It is no exaggeration to say that inventor John Browning’s firearms changed the world. The holder of 128 firearm patents, he invented such seminal military guns as the Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol, the Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun, the M1895 gas-operated machine gun, the .50-caliber M2 (“Ma Deuce”) machine gun and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (the BAR of World War II fame). According to author Nathan Gorenstein, manufacturers worldwide have rolled out an estimated 35–40 million firearms patterned after the inventor’s designs. That number, Gorenstein concedes, is almost certainly too low when one considers the countless knockoffs, as well as firearms influenced by Browning’s designs. “As Henry Ford was to automobiles, and Thomas Edison was to electricity,” the author writes, “Browning was to firearms.” Yet for most of his life the brilliant inventor remained obscure. Gorenstein aims to remedy that with this first comprehensive biography of Browning.
Browning came from humble, prodigious stock. Born in Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1855, he was the son of Mormon gunsmith Jonathan Browning, who with his three wives fathered 22 children. John (No. 13) tinkered in his father’s workshop from age 6 and by his mid-teens was a skilled metalworker who could repair or copy any gun dropped off at the shop. It was a living, but
