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The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World
The first major biography of "the Thomas Edison of guns," John Moses Browning, a visionary inventor who designed the modern handgun and whose astonishing array of firearms armed American troops since before World War I, proved decisive in World War II, and became integral to American culture. Few people are aware that Browning--a tall, modest man born in 1855 and raised as a Mormon in the American West-- invented the crucial design used in virtually all modern pistols, created the most popular hunting rifles and shotguns, and conceived the machine guns introduced in World War I and which dominated air and land battles in World War II. Yet few in America knew his name until he was into his sixties. Now, author Nathan Gorenstein brings firearms inventor John Moses Browning to vivid life in this riveting and revealing biography. Embodying the tradition of self-made, self-educated geniuses (like Lincoln and Edison), Browning was able to think in three dimensions (he never used blueprints) and his gifted mind produced everything from the famous Winchester "30-30" hunting rifle to the awesomely effective machine guns used by every American aircraft and infantry unit in World War II. The British credited Browning's guns with helping to win the Battle of Britain. His inventions illustrate both the good and bad of weapons. Sweeping, lively, and brilliantly told, this fascinating book introduces a little-known American legend whose impact on history ranks with that of the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
335 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 25, 2021
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418 people want to read
About the author
Nathan Gorenstein
2 books8 followers Nathan Gorenstein grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, graduated from Medford High and UMass, Amherst. After working at the newspaper in nearby Northampton, he left for Delaware, where he worked for the local News-Journal, and later Philadelphia, where he was a reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Guns of John Moses Browning is his second book.
The Guns of John Moses Browning is his second book.
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October 19, 2021
Some men have minds that are simply not like those of others, but far better, on a different plane entirely. Such men are vanishingly rare, and appear to be even rarer, because their unique talents are often lost to mankind, when they are not recognized by or not applicable to the society in which they are born. John Moses Browning, who lived from 1855 to 1926, was fortunate in that his peerless spatial-mechanical talent, specifically for the manufacture of firearms, coincided with the right time for his talents to achieve their full potential. A substantial majority of all today’s firearms rely on his insights; I cannot think of another field in which one man has dominated the entire modern era—and whose work shows no signs of fading in importance.
I know a fair bit about guns, both their workings and their manufacture (it pays to be so educated in these days of future chaos), and so I was pleased that the author of this biography of Browning, Nathan Gorenstein, did not dumb his book down. He more than adequately explains the specifics of Browning’s crucial inventions, without turning the book into a technical manual. Maybe a few more drawings would have been nice, but the prose is sleekly written, and a glossary is provided for those new to the topic, so the book hits a sweet spot for most readers. Of course, this book did not get a review in the New York Times, which mostly shills books for Commies and trannies, both of which are wholly absent here. Still, it is refreshing that a mainstream press will still publish a book that does not once bow in the direction of any modern hysterics about guns.
I think that like sharks, guns have now become largely perfected for their evolutionary niche. Yes, worthwhile tweaks and variations are made here and there, and accessories of various kinds frequently come to market, some staying for the long term, others not. New materials (such as the polymer frames of Glocks or attachment systems for AR-platform accessories) and new rounds arrive on the scene. But these are all merely icing on the top of the long-established basic mechanics of guns. That our military is always announcing some new small arms weapons system, and then abandoning the effort a few years later, after spending a few tens of millions of dollars, suggests this will remain true. Five hundred years from now, assuming we are not all breaking animal bones with stones to get at the marrow, we’ll probably still use recognizable guns—just as Sean Connery does in the movie Outland, set in a mining colony on Jupiter’s moon Io. And Browning’s designs will still probably be the ones we use.
Browning was born to a Mormon patriarch of the old school, who had moved west with the forced Mormon migration out of Illinois and was married to three women, simultaneously, creating a tangled family tree. In his adulthood, Browning himself seems to have been an indifferent Mormon—he drank, at least while traveling, and once, only once, proposed plural marriage to his wife, who in returned implicitly threatened to kill him. He grew up in, and kept as his home base his whole life, Ogden, Utah, which changed from a sleepy frontier town to a boomtown when the railroad arrived in 1869. With the railroad came links to the outside world, and most importantly, different people bearing different firearms.
As with many men of that time, before college was foolishly pushed as a universal, Browning’s formal schooling was minimal, and by his early teens he was working full-time in his father’s shop, which combined general metalworking and gun repair. His father was an unfocused, messy man, however, who also pursued other failed entrepreneurial ventures and did not maintain an orderly shop, nor offer much direction to his son. In some ways, this chaos helped the young Browning, who with his brothers and half-brothers could always find repair projects and scrap metal with which to experiment, and who quickly learned the essentials of metalworking by doing. He gravitated to analyzing how guns worked; at this point in the nineteenth century, a great number of very different, mostly very imperfect, gun designs were on the market, and many ended up as repair projects in his father’s shop, brought by those traveling along the railroad.
But Browning didn’t want to spend his life doing random odd jobs. He wanted a way to use his mechanical talent, which he felt keenly, to do great things. He subscribed to Scientific American (as my brother and I did as children, learning quite a bit—though you can learn nothing today from the far-left agitprop magazine that now goes under that name), absorbing its lists of inventions and the latest patents. What he decided to invent was a new type of single-shot breechloading rifle, superseding the relatively primitive Sharps. He combined what had required many operations on earlier rifles into far fewer, simplifying the mechanism, and making it more robust and more affordable. This rifle, patented in 1879, when Browning was twenty-four, became known as the Winchester Model 1885.
At first Browning and his brothers manufactured the gun in their simple machine shop, making a few hundred copies. But then the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, based in Connecticut, seeking improved designs and realizing what Browning had made had market potential, sent a representative in 1883 to investigate Browning. Winchester quickly bought the patent, and started making the guns in 1885 (hence the designation). This set the pattern for the future—Browning would design in Utah, and produce prototypes with his brothers, which would be manufactured in quantity, and marketed, by industrial concerns with the necessary production capacity back east, mostly Winchester, but also later Colt. And because many different guns were offered on the American market, the mere fact that Browning’s guns almost always sold far better than others showed his genius.
The strategy paid off for Winchester, and for Browning. It is worth noting the importance of patents in this saga. Browning became rich, and that was only possible because of the patent system. While modern patents are heavily manipulated and skewed towards those who already have wealth and influence, and a great many bogus patents are used to retard, rather than speed, technological progress, in earlier times patents were an essential mechanism to protect inventors. This was recognized in the Constitution, but I suppose it’s just another sign of the decay of the republic that patents, and even more copyright, have mostly become ways for the rich and powerful to enrich themselves at the expense of the common man.
In 1884, Browning traveled east with his brother and delivered what would become the Model 1886—the classic lever gun, a multi-shot, repeating rifle, the basic form of which is instantly recognizable even today. While, as with the Model 1885, the 1886 embodied some elements of earlier guns, it made significant advances, and was far more robust than previous offerings, therefore capable of firing more powerful rounds (especially needed as smokeless powder replaced black powder). Both guns quickly became best-sellers, and were widely lauded by the (then far more manly) press, as well as by prominent hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt. The fame of the 1886 rifle, in particular, was helped by its use in two notable events: the Johnson County War, in 1892, between cattle ranchers and homesteaders (the subject of the infamous movie flop Heaven’s Gate) and the destruction of the Dalton gang in Kansas, trapped as they tried to rob two banks, and slaughtered by townsmen armed with the rifles.
Browning kept his nose to the gun-making grindstone. From 1887 to 1889, however, he toiled as a Mormon missionary in Georgia. He wasn’t a teenager; he was thirty-two, and his fourth child had just been born. But then as now, Mormons were expected to pursue missionary work, and so he did. It was more dangerous at that time, too, given animosity toward Mormons, in particular for their polygamous ways. Still, Browning kept designing guns even while doing missionary work—he was very keen not to waste time that could be spent exercising his talents, and for his entire life felt that he had gotten started too late on his life’s work, wasting his early years on unproductive activity. During this time, for example, he designed, and Winchester quickly brought out, a pump-action .22, the Model 1890. More than two million of these guns were produced over the next few decades; they were extensively used in recreational shooting galleries, such as the ones Disneyland used to have, until the late 1950s, in better days gone by.
Unlike most men, and even most geniuses, whose intellectual productivity peaks early and who very rarely produce anything earthshattering after the age of forty, Browning’s fertile mind kept producing new ideas at basically the same rate, or even at an accelerated rate, throughout his life. In 1889, he designed the first gas-powered repeating gun, which bled gas from one round’s firing to reset the action for the next shot. This principle is the basis of nearly all repeating rifles today (though not of most handguns). He did this in service of making a machine gun, and he offered the gun to Colt, because Winchester, focused on hunting and recreational guns, had no interest in a machine gun, which was obviously a military weapon. Browning aimed to compete with the successful Maxim gun, which operated via harnessing recoil, not gas, and was less reliable than Browning’s gun. When he demonstrated his prototype, Colt executives were very impressed—but there was no market for the gun in America, given that America was fighting no wars in which a machine gun might be useful, and anyway the gun lacked a cooling mechanism, limiting its usefulness because it could only fire a few hundred rounds before having to cool down. Browning decided to keep refining the design on his own.
While he came up with new ideas, he kept improving his old ones, for example developing an improved lever-action repeater (the Model 1894) and refining his early shotgun designs. Then he also added pistols to his repertoire, inventing the slide-and-tilting-barrel, locked breech, action that is the basis of essentially all modern automatics. When Colt told him the company was uninterested in compact, lower-powered pistols (such as .32 and .25 caliber), Browning took his sleek designs for those to the Belgian weapons maker known as FN (for “Fabrique National”), which still exists today. The resulting pistols produced by FN were wildly popular all over Europe; the French started referring to any small pistol as “le browning.” Military buyers didn’t think much of them, but average citizens bought them by the millions.
Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Gavrilo Princip used one of Browning’s .380 ACP pistols (a round itself also invented by Browning) in 1914 to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. High-profile crimes, and yellow journalism, led in the early twentieth century to occasional efforts at gun control in the United States, in a few big Eastern cities, aimed at such easily-concealed weapons (never aimed at heavier weapons). In a way, therefore, American gun control was an unintended result of the success of Browning’s guns, which resulted in, if not an actual increase in crime, the perception of an increase in crime in urban areas. State-level, much less federal-level, gun control would have been regarded as insane at that time, of course. Before the modern era, gun control was wholly antithetical to the American ethos, and the only widespread gun grabbing any government engaged in was attempts by the Democrats to keep guns out the hands of black people in the southern states. Given that our gangster government has long massively expanded gun control, this era of government modesty seems like the distant past now. Yet, given that today we’re in the era where you can easily print guns, including Browning’s designs, it seems like we’re coming full circle on the ability of citizens to maintain needed weapons. Let’s hope so.
Not done yet, Browning invented, in 1911, the M1911 pistol, the iconic .45 caliber handgun carried by the American military until the 1990s, which included many very important advances, such as in the trigger mechanism, and was used in World War I, including by Alvin York in his once-famous encounter. He returned to machine guns, in 1917 inventing the M1919 machine gun, an air-cooled gun extensively used by the United States military for the entire twentieth century, and still used by some countries today. He invented the BAR, the Browning Automatic Rifle, a hand-held, hard-hitting, 20-round-magazine-fed machine gun that saw extensive use in World War II (and the M240 gun today in use, a belt-fed gun, is very similar to the BAR). And, finally, before he dropped dead in his Belgian office of a heart attack in 1926, at age seventy-one, he finished most of the work on the M2, the instantly-recognizable .50 caliber machine gun still in use all over the world today.
What explains Browning’s genius? According to Gorenstein, who documents his claim, Browning was preternaturally able at mental spatial manipulation. He could create visible mechanical objects in his mind, iteratively manipulate, in an interactive fashion, variations of them mentally, and then reduce the best designs to metal directly, rather than by first creating drawings. Of course, raw intelligence, focus, and a relentless work ethic enabled this talent to come to fruition; it’s not enough to have talent if one is simply a dreamer, or an idiot savant. This ability to think in images, rather than words, seems to be frequent among those with extreme gifts—for example, both Albert Einstein and John von Neumann suggested that their mental processes revolved around images, rather than words, even though mechanical inventions were not their specific talent. In these days of computer-driven everything, I don’t know if spatial manipulation is still as useful a specific talent in invention, but at this time, it was the key to a great deal of human advancement, and it certainly is one marker of outlier mental abilities useful to mankind.
Oddly, it does not appear that the massive increase in population in modern times, in organized, stratified societies such as ours where talent is very likely to be recognized and nurtured, has increased our number of geniuses. You would think that if the percentage is constant over time, we’d have more today. I suppose it’s hard to measure how many geniuses we have, but I can’t think of any prominent modern geniuses, who really stand out from the herd. Nearly everyone celebrated today as a genius in supposedly talent-based fields is a moron whose “genius” is a lie (Anthony Fauci) or has accomplished only tasks of negative social value (Mark Zuckerberg). Probably this is both because recognizing, advancing, and rewarding genius is perceived by our elites as racist and sexist, for obvious reasons, and because advanced technology, being very complex, is necessarily the product of many men working together, in a way that was not true in Browning’s day. Likely our geniuses are toiling unnoticed within larger projects, or are using their talents in obscure fields like higher mathematics. Or, also likely, a great many are wasting their talents in worthless, yet personally remunerative, fields, such as finance and law, where we have perhaps fifty times as many people working, mostly grossly overpaid, as a well-run society would have. Too bad.
Unlike many other famous men, Browning did not believe his success made his opinion relevant on matters outside his competency. He gave no interviews and he did not care what people thought of him, at least outside his family. He did subscribe, at least to some degree, to the common delusion of military inventors of the past, that improved killing machines would make wars less likely. At the same time he was a strong American patriot, when America was something worth being patriotic about, eager to assist the American military in meeting its needs (while being adequately compensated). When he died, he was honored by the nation and his family, and nobody had a bad word to say about him, or if anyone did, he kept it to himself. The world is very different now, but this is an educational book, for both children and adults, both about guns and about how a well-run society approaches and encourages technological advances.
I know a fair bit about guns, both their workings and their manufacture (it pays to be so educated in these days of future chaos), and so I was pleased that the author of this biography of Browning, Nathan Gorenstein, did not dumb his book down. He more than adequately explains the specifics of Browning’s crucial inventions, without turning the book into a technical manual. Maybe a few more drawings would have been nice, but the prose is sleekly written, and a glossary is provided for those new to the topic, so the book hits a sweet spot for most readers. Of course, this book did not get a review in the New York Times, which mostly shills books for Commies and trannies, both of which are wholly absent here. Still, it is refreshing that a mainstream press will still publish a book that does not once bow in the direction of any modern hysterics about guns.
I think that like sharks, guns have now become largely perfected for their evolutionary niche. Yes, worthwhile tweaks and variations are made here and there, and accessories of various kinds frequently come to market, some staying for the long term, others not. New materials (such as the polymer frames of Glocks or attachment systems for AR-platform accessories) and new rounds arrive on the scene. But these are all merely icing on the top of the long-established basic mechanics of guns. That our military is always announcing some new small arms weapons system, and then abandoning the effort a few years later, after spending a few tens of millions of dollars, suggests this will remain true. Five hundred years from now, assuming we are not all breaking animal bones with stones to get at the marrow, we’ll probably still use recognizable guns—just as Sean Connery does in the movie Outland, set in a mining colony on Jupiter’s moon Io. And Browning’s designs will still probably be the ones we use.
Browning was born to a Mormon patriarch of the old school, who had moved west with the forced Mormon migration out of Illinois and was married to three women, simultaneously, creating a tangled family tree. In his adulthood, Browning himself seems to have been an indifferent Mormon—he drank, at least while traveling, and once, only once, proposed plural marriage to his wife, who in returned implicitly threatened to kill him. He grew up in, and kept as his home base his whole life, Ogden, Utah, which changed from a sleepy frontier town to a boomtown when the railroad arrived in 1869. With the railroad came links to the outside world, and most importantly, different people bearing different firearms.
As with many men of that time, before college was foolishly pushed as a universal, Browning’s formal schooling was minimal, and by his early teens he was working full-time in his father’s shop, which combined general metalworking and gun repair. His father was an unfocused, messy man, however, who also pursued other failed entrepreneurial ventures and did not maintain an orderly shop, nor offer much direction to his son. In some ways, this chaos helped the young Browning, who with his brothers and half-brothers could always find repair projects and scrap metal with which to experiment, and who quickly learned the essentials of metalworking by doing. He gravitated to analyzing how guns worked; at this point in the nineteenth century, a great number of very different, mostly very imperfect, gun designs were on the market, and many ended up as repair projects in his father’s shop, brought by those traveling along the railroad.
But Browning didn’t want to spend his life doing random odd jobs. He wanted a way to use his mechanical talent, which he felt keenly, to do great things. He subscribed to Scientific American (as my brother and I did as children, learning quite a bit—though you can learn nothing today from the far-left agitprop magazine that now goes under that name), absorbing its lists of inventions and the latest patents. What he decided to invent was a new type of single-shot breechloading rifle, superseding the relatively primitive Sharps. He combined what had required many operations on earlier rifles into far fewer, simplifying the mechanism, and making it more robust and more affordable. This rifle, patented in 1879, when Browning was twenty-four, became known as the Winchester Model 1885.
At first Browning and his brothers manufactured the gun in their simple machine shop, making a few hundred copies. But then the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, based in Connecticut, seeking improved designs and realizing what Browning had made had market potential, sent a representative in 1883 to investigate Browning. Winchester quickly bought the patent, and started making the guns in 1885 (hence the designation). This set the pattern for the future—Browning would design in Utah, and produce prototypes with his brothers, which would be manufactured in quantity, and marketed, by industrial concerns with the necessary production capacity back east, mostly Winchester, but also later Colt. And because many different guns were offered on the American market, the mere fact that Browning’s guns almost always sold far better than others showed his genius.
The strategy paid off for Winchester, and for Browning. It is worth noting the importance of patents in this saga. Browning became rich, and that was only possible because of the patent system. While modern patents are heavily manipulated and skewed towards those who already have wealth and influence, and a great many bogus patents are used to retard, rather than speed, technological progress, in earlier times patents were an essential mechanism to protect inventors. This was recognized in the Constitution, but I suppose it’s just another sign of the decay of the republic that patents, and even more copyright, have mostly become ways for the rich and powerful to enrich themselves at the expense of the common man.
In 1884, Browning traveled east with his brother and delivered what would become the Model 1886—the classic lever gun, a multi-shot, repeating rifle, the basic form of which is instantly recognizable even today. While, as with the Model 1885, the 1886 embodied some elements of earlier guns, it made significant advances, and was far more robust than previous offerings, therefore capable of firing more powerful rounds (especially needed as smokeless powder replaced black powder). Both guns quickly became best-sellers, and were widely lauded by the (then far more manly) press, as well as by prominent hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt. The fame of the 1886 rifle, in particular, was helped by its use in two notable events: the Johnson County War, in 1892, between cattle ranchers and homesteaders (the subject of the infamous movie flop Heaven’s Gate) and the destruction of the Dalton gang in Kansas, trapped as they tried to rob two banks, and slaughtered by townsmen armed with the rifles.
Browning kept his nose to the gun-making grindstone. From 1887 to 1889, however, he toiled as a Mormon missionary in Georgia. He wasn’t a teenager; he was thirty-two, and his fourth child had just been born. But then as now, Mormons were expected to pursue missionary work, and so he did. It was more dangerous at that time, too, given animosity toward Mormons, in particular for their polygamous ways. Still, Browning kept designing guns even while doing missionary work—he was very keen not to waste time that could be spent exercising his talents, and for his entire life felt that he had gotten started too late on his life’s work, wasting his early years on unproductive activity. During this time, for example, he designed, and Winchester quickly brought out, a pump-action .22, the Model 1890. More than two million of these guns were produced over the next few decades; they were extensively used in recreational shooting galleries, such as the ones Disneyland used to have, until the late 1950s, in better days gone by.
Unlike most men, and even most geniuses, whose intellectual productivity peaks early and who very rarely produce anything earthshattering after the age of forty, Browning’s fertile mind kept producing new ideas at basically the same rate, or even at an accelerated rate, throughout his life. In 1889, he designed the first gas-powered repeating gun, which bled gas from one round’s firing to reset the action for the next shot. This principle is the basis of nearly all repeating rifles today (though not of most handguns). He did this in service of making a machine gun, and he offered the gun to Colt, because Winchester, focused on hunting and recreational guns, had no interest in a machine gun, which was obviously a military weapon. Browning aimed to compete with the successful Maxim gun, which operated via harnessing recoil, not gas, and was less reliable than Browning’s gun. When he demonstrated his prototype, Colt executives were very impressed—but there was no market for the gun in America, given that America was fighting no wars in which a machine gun might be useful, and anyway the gun lacked a cooling mechanism, limiting its usefulness because it could only fire a few hundred rounds before having to cool down. Browning decided to keep refining the design on his own.
While he came up with new ideas, he kept improving his old ones, for example developing an improved lever-action repeater (the Model 1894) and refining his early shotgun designs. Then he also added pistols to his repertoire, inventing the slide-and-tilting-barrel, locked breech, action that is the basis of essentially all modern automatics. When Colt told him the company was uninterested in compact, lower-powered pistols (such as .32 and .25 caliber), Browning took his sleek designs for those to the Belgian weapons maker known as FN (for “Fabrique National”), which still exists today. The resulting pistols produced by FN were wildly popular all over Europe; the French started referring to any small pistol as “le browning.” Military buyers didn’t think much of them, but average citizens bought them by the millions.
Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Gavrilo Princip used one of Browning’s .380 ACP pistols (a round itself also invented by Browning) in 1914 to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. High-profile crimes, and yellow journalism, led in the early twentieth century to occasional efforts at gun control in the United States, in a few big Eastern cities, aimed at such easily-concealed weapons (never aimed at heavier weapons). In a way, therefore, American gun control was an unintended result of the success of Browning’s guns, which resulted in, if not an actual increase in crime, the perception of an increase in crime in urban areas. State-level, much less federal-level, gun control would have been regarded as insane at that time, of course. Before the modern era, gun control was wholly antithetical to the American ethos, and the only widespread gun grabbing any government engaged in was attempts by the Democrats to keep guns out the hands of black people in the southern states. Given that our gangster government has long massively expanded gun control, this era of government modesty seems like the distant past now. Yet, given that today we’re in the era where you can easily print guns, including Browning’s designs, it seems like we’re coming full circle on the ability of citizens to maintain needed weapons. Let’s hope so.
Not done yet, Browning invented, in 1911, the M1911 pistol, the iconic .45 caliber handgun carried by the American military until the 1990s, which included many very important advances, such as in the trigger mechanism, and was used in World War I, including by Alvin York in his once-famous encounter. He returned to machine guns, in 1917 inventing the M1919 machine gun, an air-cooled gun extensively used by the United States military for the entire twentieth century, and still used by some countries today. He invented the BAR, the Browning Automatic Rifle, a hand-held, hard-hitting, 20-round-magazine-fed machine gun that saw extensive use in World War II (and the M240 gun today in use, a belt-fed gun, is very similar to the BAR). And, finally, before he dropped dead in his Belgian office of a heart attack in 1926, at age seventy-one, he finished most of the work on the M2, the instantly-recognizable .50 caliber machine gun still in use all over the world today.
What explains Browning’s genius? According to Gorenstein, who documents his claim, Browning was preternaturally able at mental spatial manipulation. He could create visible mechanical objects in his mind, iteratively manipulate, in an interactive fashion, variations of them mentally, and then reduce the best designs to metal directly, rather than by first creating drawings. Of course, raw intelligence, focus, and a relentless work ethic enabled this talent to come to fruition; it’s not enough to have talent if one is simply a dreamer, or an idiot savant. This ability to think in images, rather than words, seems to be frequent among those with extreme gifts—for example, both Albert Einstein and John von Neumann suggested that their mental processes revolved around images, rather than words, even though mechanical inventions were not their specific talent. In these days of computer-driven everything, I don’t know if spatial manipulation is still as useful a specific talent in invention, but at this time, it was the key to a great deal of human advancement, and it certainly is one marker of outlier mental abilities useful to mankind.
Oddly, it does not appear that the massive increase in population in modern times, in organized, stratified societies such as ours where talent is very likely to be recognized and nurtured, has increased our number of geniuses. You would think that if the percentage is constant over time, we’d have more today. I suppose it’s hard to measure how many geniuses we have, but I can’t think of any prominent modern geniuses, who really stand out from the herd. Nearly everyone celebrated today as a genius in supposedly talent-based fields is a moron whose “genius” is a lie (Anthony Fauci) or has accomplished only tasks of negative social value (Mark Zuckerberg). Probably this is both because recognizing, advancing, and rewarding genius is perceived by our elites as racist and sexist, for obvious reasons, and because advanced technology, being very complex, is necessarily the product of many men working together, in a way that was not true in Browning’s day. Likely our geniuses are toiling unnoticed within larger projects, or are using their talents in obscure fields like higher mathematics. Or, also likely, a great many are wasting their talents in worthless, yet personally remunerative, fields, such as finance and law, where we have perhaps fifty times as many people working, mostly grossly overpaid, as a well-run society would have. Too bad.
Unlike many other famous men, Browning did not believe his success made his opinion relevant on matters outside his competency. He gave no interviews and he did not care what people thought of him, at least outside his family. He did subscribe, at least to some degree, to the common delusion of military inventors of the past, that improved killing machines would make wars less likely. At the same time he was a strong American patriot, when America was something worth being patriotic about, eager to assist the American military in meeting its needs (while being adequately compensated). When he died, he was honored by the nation and his family, and nobody had a bad word to say about him, or if anyone did, he kept it to himself. The world is very different now, but this is an educational book, for both children and adults, both about guns and about how a well-run society approaches and encourages technological advances.
March 25, 2023
Extremely well done! The author doesn’t talk down to the uninformed novice but instead not only does he explain technical details in an interesting yet easy to understand way, he also has very detailed footnotes that I actually learned things from as well as a glossary before it that gives a good concise definition of firearm parts and concepts.
At the same time he gives those of us who have already known something about the true genius that Browning exhibited an interesting glimpse of the man himself, along with his creative process & rather amazing abilities in thinking in three dimensions of a finished product instead of one aspect at a time like most people are familiar with doing. Quite frankly, if he had the ego of just an ordinary person he would be more of a household name and rivaling Edison regarding his groundbreaking work in so many ways to his chosen field if not for Winchester having their name associated with the majority of his work!
To many shooters both military and civilian he is well known for the Model 1911 that served as the US Military sidearm for 75 years and is still widely used today in competitions all over as well as as the defensive sidearm for many people.
I learned several things of importance from the notes in the back, such as that the world might have been quite different. The BAR, 1911 & especially the Browning .30 & .50 are credited with first saving the British in the Battle for Britain & WWII in general. However only the 1911 had been invented by him when he booked passage home but had to cancel the trip. He bought tickets for the only voyage of the Titanic! By the end of WWII more than 2 million M2s alone had been deployed along with the Ma Deuce nick-name.
Here’s an interesting viewpoint on the effectiveness of the 6 M2s in a P-51 Mustang that gives a description of being on the receiving end of a 4 second burst 💥 the convergence zone is a 6’x10’ rectangle that has 300 armor-piercing projectiles weighing 26 lbs going over 2,300 fps into an area smaller than the side of a 2020 Ford Mustang!
Browning’s genius is actually behind another weapon that we use now. It turns out that FN took his BAR & turned the action upside down then switched it to belt feeding to create the M240! And the Beretta M9 used the slide he invented and lastly the SigSauer M17 & the civilian version called the P320 uses the tilting barrel & slide Browning invented in 1896. The US currently has over 50,000 M2s in use. And the lever action rifles he designed in 1866 are still being produced today by five different companies.
Now that the patent is expired people are making the 1911 in at least 4 calibers & many sizes. The Soviet Union made over 1.5 million Tokarev TT-33 pistols that are clones of his 1903 pistols. FN stopped making Browning Hi Powers in 2017 & now a Turkish firm makes them along with the 1911. Even the AK47 uses a safety lever that is from a Browning model 8 rifle. Ithaca waited for the patent to expire on a 1913 Browning shotgun to produce their model 1937, which is now the only pre-WWII shotgun design still in production today, with over 2 million & counting sold. In total, using a very low estimate, more than 40 million firearms have been made using John Browning’s designs. Quite a career! No other inventors have ever come close to that & likely never will!
To sum up this review I simply think that even Thomas Edison with his many patents wasn’t able to invent anything that could still be produced unchanged even twenty years later, much less the over 100 years that separate us from when John Moses Browning first created them.
At the same time he gives those of us who have already known something about the true genius that Browning exhibited an interesting glimpse of the man himself, along with his creative process & rather amazing abilities in thinking in three dimensions of a finished product instead of one aspect at a time like most people are familiar with doing. Quite frankly, if he had the ego of just an ordinary person he would be more of a household name and rivaling Edison regarding his groundbreaking work in so many ways to his chosen field if not for Winchester having their name associated with the majority of his work!
To many shooters both military and civilian he is well known for the Model 1911 that served as the US Military sidearm for 75 years and is still widely used today in competitions all over as well as as the defensive sidearm for many people.
I learned several things of importance from the notes in the back, such as that the world might have been quite different. The BAR, 1911 & especially the Browning .30 & .50 are credited with first saving the British in the Battle for Britain & WWII in general. However only the 1911 had been invented by him when he booked passage home but had to cancel the trip. He bought tickets for the only voyage of the Titanic! By the end of WWII more than 2 million M2s alone had been deployed along with the Ma Deuce nick-name.
Here’s an interesting viewpoint on the effectiveness of the 6 M2s in a P-51 Mustang that gives a description of being on the receiving end of a 4 second burst 💥 the convergence zone is a 6’x10’ rectangle that has 300 armor-piercing projectiles weighing 26 lbs going over 2,300 fps into an area smaller than the side of a 2020 Ford Mustang!
Browning’s genius is actually behind another weapon that we use now. It turns out that FN took his BAR & turned the action upside down then switched it to belt feeding to create the M240! And the Beretta M9 used the slide he invented and lastly the SigSauer M17 & the civilian version called the P320 uses the tilting barrel & slide Browning invented in 1896. The US currently has over 50,000 M2s in use. And the lever action rifles he designed in 1866 are still being produced today by five different companies.
Now that the patent is expired people are making the 1911 in at least 4 calibers & many sizes. The Soviet Union made over 1.5 million Tokarev TT-33 pistols that are clones of his 1903 pistols. FN stopped making Browning Hi Powers in 2017 & now a Turkish firm makes them along with the 1911. Even the AK47 uses a safety lever that is from a Browning model 8 rifle. Ithaca waited for the patent to expire on a 1913 Browning shotgun to produce their model 1937, which is now the only pre-WWII shotgun design still in production today, with over 2 million & counting sold. In total, using a very low estimate, more than 40 million firearms have been made using John Browning’s designs. Quite a career! No other inventors have ever come close to that & likely never will!
To sum up this review I simply think that even Thomas Edison with his many patents wasn’t able to invent anything that could still be produced unchanged even twenty years later, much less the over 100 years that separate us from when John Moses Browning first created them.
April 5, 2024
Excellent
August 28, 2025
This book wonderfully captures an important era of the United States through the story of a master inventor and his iconic guns.
October 16, 2021
Fascinating, insightful, and thoroughly well researched book about the Browning family and their amazing 128 patents about firearms. Well, the book is not about all 128, but the reader will get the point!
May 24, 2021
Gorenstein fashions something I'd never been interested in, gun design, into a fascinating read. I never really thought much about how guns even work, and the descriptions here make it all clear to a novice like me. He was an investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and it shows.
A shy genius, Browning pictured his inventions in his head and worked without drawings. He started in the 1870s. He'd build his prototypes in Utah, bring them on the train to manufacturers in the East and sell the designs to the likes of Colt and Winchester. Later the guns were made by Fabrique Nationale in Belgium. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, which sparked the first World War, was accomplished with a Browning design, the 1910 handgun. His 1911 design was also well known and revered in gun circles.) Machine guns and semi automatics, also first designed in his mind, and then made by FN well into the 20th century, became ubiquitous and were used in wars all over the world. I didn't know any of this before reading this book.
It's being published this week so I'm getting the word out although I'm still reading it. The name Browning should be as well known as Smith & Wesson, Glock and Luger are.
A shy genius, Browning pictured his inventions in his head and worked without drawings. He started in the 1870s. He'd build his prototypes in Utah, bring them on the train to manufacturers in the East and sell the designs to the likes of Colt and Winchester. Later the guns were made by Fabrique Nationale in Belgium. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, which sparked the first World War, was accomplished with a Browning design, the 1910 handgun. His 1911 design was also well known and revered in gun circles.) Machine guns and semi automatics, also first designed in his mind, and then made by FN well into the 20th century, became ubiquitous and were used in wars all over the world. I didn't know any of this before reading this book.
It's being published this week so I'm getting the word out although I'm still reading it. The name Browning should be as well known as Smith & Wesson, Glock and Luger are.
June 26, 2021
A rather basic biography with some new information.
While the book does offer some new information about Browning, it is a rather basic biography. The author does not seem to be that familiar with firearms and that shows when covering the designs of Browning. The various designs are not covered in depth and this is not a book for someone wanting technical details.
The first half of the book covers the life of Browning, where as the last half is filled with stories of ww2 combat that while Browning designs were used in the events, don't really add to the Browning story. It seems like the stories were added as filler to increase the page count.
While the book does offer some new information about Browning, it is a rather basic biography. The author does not seem to be that familiar with firearms and that shows when covering the designs of Browning. The various designs are not covered in depth and this is not a book for someone wanting technical details.
The first half of the book covers the life of Browning, where as the last half is filled with stories of ww2 combat that while Browning designs were used in the events, don't really add to the Browning story. It seems like the stories were added as filler to increase the page count.
September 18, 2021
I'm a big fan of firearms designers and firearms history, and Browning is certainly one of the greatest of all time. It was very interesting learning about his very humble beginnings (learning by working in a rural repair shop), to his licensing and international travel (business travel by ocean liner was surprisingly similar to modern business travel, just much longer trips/slower), and the leading role firearms played in mass production and precision machining. Maybe not the most interesting read for most people, but I really liked this book
August 26, 2021
The first part of this book was quite interesting. The rest of it was not.
December 31, 2023
Was very excited to get this from my son for Christmas. My son and I have recently (the last 3 years) gotten into shooting sports (mostly Trap), and the Browning name is ubiquitous. I have always heard how much of a mechanical genius he was, but this book tells the story wonderfully.
As the title suggests, it is the "Guns of" John Browning, not just about his life. In fact, it would be rather weak as a stand-along biography as it doesn't go as far into the man as perhaps many bio-readers may enjoy, but focuses on the firearms, their mechanisms, and the impact they made. It is a solid 5-stars in my book, the author, who was unknown to me, did a magnificent job.
He starts with a story of the use of the Browning-made weapons - Gavrilo Princip and the start of WW I. This well-known story is used to explain the excellent quality of the pistol used with the Browning design.
Then he does start in 1955 and runs a solid early bio of John Browning, by starting with his father and the move to Utah, then all the kids from polygamy marriages. The father (Jonathan Browning) was a blacksmith and firearms repairman; fashioning parts from his own forge. John worked in the shop as a teen and early 20s, but didn't start to really manufacture until help arrived with his brothers Matt (the business mind) and Ed (the expert machinist). This was a really interesting section seeing the arc of early successes and how they never wanted their own factory. John just wanted to make the guns operational, and allowed Winchester, Colt, and later FN do the manufacturing.
There is discussion of how the firearms had been used, both in hunting and in military capacities. Use in the Spanish-American War, and certainly in WW I. In that latter conflict, many of the American/Allied arms were of Browning design, especially the M1911 pistol and the 30-caliber machine gun. Much was discussed of the development of these two, and then that third, the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) which is prominently displayed on the cover with John Browning himself firing at a military firearms test.
There are some side stories about some of the changes from Browning and the relationships with the manufacturing companies, about the kids starting to take over aspects of the business, and the relationships within the family. Then one of these stories morphs into a incident in 1923 with Mariner Browning (Matt Browning's son) fatialing shooting the estranged husband of one of John Browning's daughter. Soon after, brother Matt Browning passed from a heart attack. Not much later, John Browning dies in Belgium of a heart attack as well.
The final section of the book is on the uses of the Browning made guns in both WW I and WW II. The two most decorated soldiers in each war (Alvin York - WW I; Audie Murphy - WW II) have their stories told.
This book is a must for any firearms enthusiast as it discusses aspect of many historical guns and their development. It is well written, with excellent intros and lead-ins for many sections. The author wrote only one other book, but I may be looking into it as it may just be as interesting as this one.
As the title suggests, it is the "Guns of" John Browning, not just about his life. In fact, it would be rather weak as a stand-along biography as it doesn't go as far into the man as perhaps many bio-readers may enjoy, but focuses on the firearms, their mechanisms, and the impact they made. It is a solid 5-stars in my book, the author, who was unknown to me, did a magnificent job.
He starts with a story of the use of the Browning-made weapons - Gavrilo Princip and the start of WW I. This well-known story is used to explain the excellent quality of the pistol used with the Browning design.
Then he does start in 1955 and runs a solid early bio of John Browning, by starting with his father and the move to Utah, then all the kids from polygamy marriages. The father (Jonathan Browning) was a blacksmith and firearms repairman; fashioning parts from his own forge. John worked in the shop as a teen and early 20s, but didn't start to really manufacture until help arrived with his brothers Matt (the business mind) and Ed (the expert machinist). This was a really interesting section seeing the arc of early successes and how they never wanted their own factory. John just wanted to make the guns operational, and allowed Winchester, Colt, and later FN do the manufacturing.
There is discussion of how the firearms had been used, both in hunting and in military capacities. Use in the Spanish-American War, and certainly in WW I. In that latter conflict, many of the American/Allied arms were of Browning design, especially the M1911 pistol and the 30-caliber machine gun. Much was discussed of the development of these two, and then that third, the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) which is prominently displayed on the cover with John Browning himself firing at a military firearms test.
There are some side stories about some of the changes from Browning and the relationships with the manufacturing companies, about the kids starting to take over aspects of the business, and the relationships within the family. Then one of these stories morphs into a incident in 1923 with Mariner Browning (Matt Browning's son) fatialing shooting the estranged husband of one of John Browning's daughter. Soon after, brother Matt Browning passed from a heart attack. Not much later, John Browning dies in Belgium of a heart attack as well.
The final section of the book is on the uses of the Browning made guns in both WW I and WW II. The two most decorated soldiers in each war (Alvin York - WW I; Audie Murphy - WW II) have their stories told.
This book is a must for any firearms enthusiast as it discusses aspect of many historical guns and their development. It is well written, with excellent intros and lead-ins for many sections. The author wrote only one other book, but I may be looking into it as it may just be as interesting as this one.
March 17, 2022
An unusual, yet fitting, biography of an unsung American inventor. If you’ve ever handled a gun—a handgun, shotgun, rifle, or machine gun—chances are the weapon incorporates at least one feature invented by John Browning.
I picked this audiotape for a car trip with my father. He’d used a Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, in the Korean War. Both of us liked hearing the history of that weapon’s inventor.
Unlike other, more famous, American inventors, Browning sought no publicity for himself and even accepted a low payment from the U.S. government during wartime, out of patriotism.
The author keeps the narrative interesting and did considerable research for this book. He goes off on tangents at times, but all of them are fascinating.
Biographies of famous people tend to follow a familiar pattern. First is the humble beginning. Next is the childhood interest that will define the life course of the person. Then there are the initial attempts, the failures, and the rise to success. Often near the end, things start to fall apart.
In all these respects, this biography is no different. Gorenstein doesn’t portray Browning as flawless. Indeed, for all his genius with firearm design, Browning fell short as a husband, father, and businessman. In the latter failing, he at least could rely on his brother to manage finances well enough.
As an engineer, I found the discussion of weapon design, and Browning’s approach, interesting. His design philosophy tended toward the simple, the rugged, the elegant, the innovative. He wasn’t afraid to tinker and try new things. He seemed to be always designing new things, and indeed obtained 128 firearm-related patents.
Here’s the unusual, yet fitting, part. Most biographies conclude abruptly after the death of the principal character. Not this one. The Browning biography continues for several chapters. That’s because most of the inventor’s influence wasn’t felt until after he died. The fact that my father carried a BAR, and valued it highly, in the Korean War some 35 years after Browning designed it is testimony to the endurance of that design.
I recommend the book for those interested in firearms and those interested in the lives of inventors. You’ll enjoy it.
I picked this audiotape for a car trip with my father. He’d used a Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, in the Korean War. Both of us liked hearing the history of that weapon’s inventor.
Unlike other, more famous, American inventors, Browning sought no publicity for himself and even accepted a low payment from the U.S. government during wartime, out of patriotism.
The author keeps the narrative interesting and did considerable research for this book. He goes off on tangents at times, but all of them are fascinating.
Biographies of famous people tend to follow a familiar pattern. First is the humble beginning. Next is the childhood interest that will define the life course of the person. Then there are the initial attempts, the failures, and the rise to success. Often near the end, things start to fall apart.
In all these respects, this biography is no different. Gorenstein doesn’t portray Browning as flawless. Indeed, for all his genius with firearm design, Browning fell short as a husband, father, and businessman. In the latter failing, he at least could rely on his brother to manage finances well enough.
As an engineer, I found the discussion of weapon design, and Browning’s approach, interesting. His design philosophy tended toward the simple, the rugged, the elegant, the innovative. He wasn’t afraid to tinker and try new things. He seemed to be always designing new things, and indeed obtained 128 firearm-related patents.
Here’s the unusual, yet fitting, part. Most biographies conclude abruptly after the death of the principal character. Not this one. The Browning biography continues for several chapters. That’s because most of the inventor’s influence wasn’t felt until after he died. The fact that my father carried a BAR, and valued it highly, in the Korean War some 35 years after Browning designed it is testimony to the endurance of that design.
I recommend the book for those interested in firearms and those interested in the lives of inventors. You’ll enjoy it.
September 4, 2022
I am passably familiar with firearms, and as a military historian of course I knew a little about who Browning was. What I didn't realize was just how dominant his designs for various types of guns have been over the last century, from handguns to sporting rifles to shotguns to machine guns. The man was truly a mechanical genius who knew he had a gift and burned to use it to its fullest extent while he had time.
Maybe the best quote on Browning's impact, and his contribution to American freedom, comes on p. 232 of this edition, regarding the US military in World War II:
Every American fighter plane and bomber—numbering nearly three hundred thousand by war's end—was armed with Browning machine guns, in all but a few cases the heave .50-caliber gun. On the ground, four of America's seven major infantry weapons were Browning inventions, and a fifth, the .30-caliber M-1 carbine, had roots in a design—albeit extensively revised—that John's brother Ed Browning delivered to Winchester before Ed's death in 1939. Browning's firearms were so ubiquitous they became mere background noise in the great conflict, always there, always reliable, used everywhere. Every battle on or over the cities and fields of Europe, and the islands of the Pacific, was won with firearms that John Browning designed.
The strength of this book is that it gets just technical enough to let the layman understand the depth of Browning's genius without getting bogged down in mechanical minutiae. It never loses focus on Browning the man: a bit neglectful husband, good but stern father, collaborative brother, and shrewd businessman. He had an astonishing ability to think in three dimensions, to fully visualize complex pieces and how they would interact, without the need for drafting board or physical prototype—apparently a genetic trait shared by several members of his family. In short, he was one of that group of home-grown American inventors that seemed to spring from the soil of the 19th Century, a time when mechanical technology was advancing rapidly and when indivduals still had the freedom to make the most of it.
Maybe the best quote on Browning's impact, and his contribution to American freedom, comes on p. 232 of this edition, regarding the US military in World War II:
Every American fighter plane and bomber—numbering nearly three hundred thousand by war's end—was armed with Browning machine guns, in all but a few cases the heave .50-caliber gun. On the ground, four of America's seven major infantry weapons were Browning inventions, and a fifth, the .30-caliber M-1 carbine, had roots in a design—albeit extensively revised—that John's brother Ed Browning delivered to Winchester before Ed's death in 1939. Browning's firearms were so ubiquitous they became mere background noise in the great conflict, always there, always reliable, used everywhere. Every battle on or over the cities and fields of Europe, and the islands of the Pacific, was won with firearms that John Browning designed.
The strength of this book is that it gets just technical enough to let the layman understand the depth of Browning's genius without getting bogged down in mechanical minutiae. It never loses focus on Browning the man: a bit neglectful husband, good but stern father, collaborative brother, and shrewd businessman. He had an astonishing ability to think in three dimensions, to fully visualize complex pieces and how they would interact, without the need for drafting board or physical prototype—apparently a genetic trait shared by several members of his family. In short, he was one of that group of home-grown American inventors that seemed to spring from the soil of the 19th Century, a time when mechanical technology was advancing rapidly and when indivduals still had the freedom to make the most of it.
January 28, 2021
I am grateful to Scribner for providing me with an ARC of "The Guns of John Moses Browning," written by Nathan Gorenstein. It was a truly delightful read. It is well documented, well written, and provides an excellent introduction to the world of modern armaments. John Browning is easily the most significant and prolific genius of firearms design of the last two centuries. Coming from a modest background in antebellum America and with very little formal education, John Browning became the leading light of modern firearms design. Most people have heard of Samuel Colt and his famous revolvers rooted in clever marketing against the backdrop of American expansionism during the nineteenth century, but how many realize the significance of the many weapons designed by John Browning? Before reading (and enjoying) this book. I thought I had a pretty good background on the history of twentieth century firearms; I was wrong. Whether you are looking at assault rifles, shotguns, automatic pistols or machine guns, Browning's genius provided a starting point for many, if not most, of the significant developments in weapons design in the modern epoch. Much more than a biography, this text is a carefully contextualized study of Browning's contributions to the science of firearm design and gunmaking. I was amazed at how much I didn't know before reading this book, particularly about the social, cultural and political consequences of Browning's genius for firearms design. The author is at pains to point out how Browning's accomplishments and influence are easily a match for such luminaries (no pun intended) as Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. All this may sound rather technical and tedious; in the deft hands of this writer, it becomes fascinating and enlightening. Anyone trying to understand the origins of modern culture, both American and international, would do well to read this book. My congratulations to the author on his achievement!
January 30, 2022
You don’t need to be a firearms expert or aficionado to thoroughly enjoy the Nathan Gorenstein book, “The Guns of John Moses Browning. While I very much enjoyed the author’s presentation of the subject matter, I would normally have rated the book a four star, yet It received a five star due to exceeding my expectations. I was anticipating a much more detailed oriented description and analysis of Browning’s firearm creations. I was pleasantly surprised with an excellent narrative of Browning’s life from childhood to his death and a superlative accounting of his inventions and innovations in the world of firearms.
John Moses Browning was without a doubt the most influential and most renowned person in the the firearms industry worldwide. He probably did more for the world of firearms than Henry Ford did for the auto industry. He was a genius in his field and was a unique individual in he could think in 3-D and would often create his inventions in his mind prior to utilizing any drawing of the firearm. He could picture how each part would work in unison within his mind. He and his brothers would go on to give the firearm community concepts which were ahead of their time and many of which are still in use today. The author appropriately indicates “What Browning did was what he always did - he figured out a simple, elegant way to accomplish a complex task.” Great book for those that are firearm enthusiasts, mildly interested in the history of firearms or those with just historical interests. I only have one negative comment about Gorenstein’s work; toward the end, after John Browning’s death, the author drags on some with too many minute details of scenarios in which a Browning design was utilized by the Allies. Well worth reading.
John Moses Browning was without a doubt the most influential and most renowned person in the the firearms industry worldwide. He probably did more for the world of firearms than Henry Ford did for the auto industry. He was a genius in his field and was a unique individual in he could think in 3-D and would often create his inventions in his mind prior to utilizing any drawing of the firearm. He could picture how each part would work in unison within his mind. He and his brothers would go on to give the firearm community concepts which were ahead of their time and many of which are still in use today. The author appropriately indicates “What Browning did was what he always did - he figured out a simple, elegant way to accomplish a complex task.” Great book for those that are firearm enthusiasts, mildly interested in the history of firearms or those with just historical interests. I only have one negative comment about Gorenstein’s work; toward the end, after John Browning’s death, the author drags on some with too many minute details of scenarios in which a Browning design was utilized by the Allies. Well worth reading.
May 16, 2021
My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an advanced copy of this new biography.
The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World by Nathan Gorenstein is a new biography about the gunsmith and inventor whose creations have influenced history and politics for most of this century.
The book is extremely well written and researched with many facts and stories being published here for the first time. Starting as a young man working on repairing weapons for settlers in his father's foundry, to becoming one of the preeminent weapon designers of his day, feted by those in now, but who remained out of the spotlight, even as his weapons were changing borders and history.
What Mr. Gorenstein captures so well is not just the creativity, that Mr. Browning had, but the ability to look at something go hmm I can do better and work until he could make something more efficient.
Also this is a history of the weapons industry, explaining the various companies not just in the United States but in Europe where Mr. Browning made some his most well known weapons, and a few enemies. Mr. Gorenstein explains patent laws and court battles as well as he explains the workings and intricacies of a Browning Automatic Rifle.
An absorbing history, well researched and again well written, about a man that remained private, even as he was changing the world. I can't wait for Mr. Gorenstein's next book.
The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World by Nathan Gorenstein is a new biography about the gunsmith and inventor whose creations have influenced history and politics for most of this century.
The book is extremely well written and researched with many facts and stories being published here for the first time. Starting as a young man working on repairing weapons for settlers in his father's foundry, to becoming one of the preeminent weapon designers of his day, feted by those in now, but who remained out of the spotlight, even as his weapons were changing borders and history.
What Mr. Gorenstein captures so well is not just the creativity, that Mr. Browning had, but the ability to look at something go hmm I can do better and work until he could make something more efficient.
Also this is a history of the weapons industry, explaining the various companies not just in the United States but in Europe where Mr. Browning made some his most well known weapons, and a few enemies. Mr. Gorenstein explains patent laws and court battles as well as he explains the workings and intricacies of a Browning Automatic Rifle.
An absorbing history, well researched and again well written, about a man that remained private, even as he was changing the world. I can't wait for Mr. Gorenstein's next book.
July 31, 2023
Mormon, anti-vaxxer, a bit of obscurant (tried to prevent his son to learn at the college), definitely not the best husband and father, but on the other hand - genius of mechanical engineering and firearms, which name became a household word (in Lithuania in the first quarter of the XX century all pistols were called "brauningai"). As usual, such prominent persons have very complex characters and can't be described only in white or black.
Big plus for the biography, but some technical remarks:
a) during the Battle of Britain British fighters did not have the advantage in firepower - German fighters had 20 mm CANNONS, and no rifle-caliber MG, even designed by JMB, and installed in big numbers (8 units on "Spitfire" and "Hurricane") couldn't match the firepower of automatic cannon;
b) German figher FW-190 had better firepower than described in the book - from the very beginning it had 2x20 mm cannons, even do not counting MG-17s;
c) correct designation of the German fighter colloquialy named Me 109 is Bf 109;
d) Soviet pistol TT-33 externally resembles the FN Model 1903 pistol, and not the Colt Model 1903 pistol, as stated in the book;
e) author makes almost no distinction between M1917 and M1919 MGs naming them as ".30 caliber machine gun designed by Browning and used in WW2", but cooling system is the essential part of the machine gun, so these two MGs should be considered as two separate weapons.
Big plus for the biography, but some technical remarks:
a) during the Battle of Britain British fighters did not have the advantage in firepower - German fighters had 20 mm CANNONS, and no rifle-caliber MG, even designed by JMB, and installed in big numbers (8 units on "Spitfire" and "Hurricane") couldn't match the firepower of automatic cannon;
b) German figher FW-190 had better firepower than described in the book - from the very beginning it had 2x20 mm cannons, even do not counting MG-17s;
c) correct designation of the German fighter colloquialy named Me 109 is Bf 109;
d) Soviet pistol TT-33 externally resembles the FN Model 1903 pistol, and not the Colt Model 1903 pistol, as stated in the book;
e) author makes almost no distinction between M1917 and M1919 MGs naming them as ".30 caliber machine gun designed by Browning and used in WW2", but cooling system is the essential part of the machine gun, so these two MGs should be considered as two separate weapons.
May 9, 2022
I really enjoyed this readable and informative book. I've used and admired many firearms based on Browning's designs, so it was nice to learn more about the designer and his development process.
Gorenstein's account is easy reading and moves quickly. He provides just enough technical information to keep the design story on track - no engineering degree required!
That said, more could probably have been written about Browning's interactions with Winchester and FN, as well as his litigation and disputes with Maxim and Luger. (Compare, for example, Rasenberger's comparable biography of Samuel Colt and his revolver.)
My primary complaint is the way the book ended - the final two chapters are less about Browning and more about weapons of his design being used in WWII (and, to be fair, the guns have pride of place in the book's title). That's interesting information, but I didn't pick up a Browning biography to learn about bomber design, Audie Murphy, and marines on Guadalcanal; the final chapters come across as pasted-on fill material. Browning's contribution to the WWII (and beyond) arsenal could have been handled much more organically, and I would have preferred to hear more about how the company wound down after Browning's death.
Gorenstein's account is easy reading and moves quickly. He provides just enough technical information to keep the design story on track - no engineering degree required!
That said, more could probably have been written about Browning's interactions with Winchester and FN, as well as his litigation and disputes with Maxim and Luger. (Compare, for example, Rasenberger's comparable biography of Samuel Colt and his revolver.)
My primary complaint is the way the book ended - the final two chapters are less about Browning and more about weapons of his design being used in WWII (and, to be fair, the guns have pride of place in the book's title). That's interesting information, but I didn't pick up a Browning biography to learn about bomber design, Audie Murphy, and marines on Guadalcanal; the final chapters come across as pasted-on fill material. Browning's contribution to the WWII (and beyond) arsenal could have been handled much more organically, and I would have preferred to hear more about how the company wound down after Browning's death.
February 28, 2021
Absolutely fascinating, non-fiction book about John Moses Browning and his inventions. Written so that someone not familiar with guns would enjoy this book.
John Moses Browning built his first gun at the age of 13 using miscellaneous scrap pieces from his fathers gun shop; he and his brother brought home three birds for supper with the first shot. He wanted to go to school to become an inventor. :) John Moses Browning was able to engineer and design in 3D in his brain; so incredible.
Colt, Winchester, FN, many gun manufacturers made guns designed by Browning. His mind was constantly creating and inventing.
Over two dozens of patents have been issued in his name and/or his brothers name (his partner). Guns that he had designed were manufactured for decades after his death.
So very glad that I had the opportunity to read this book.
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher (Scribner) and the author Nathan Gorenstein for the opportunity to read and review the advance read copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Publication date is scheduled for May 25, 2021.
John Moses Browning built his first gun at the age of 13 using miscellaneous scrap pieces from his fathers gun shop; he and his brother brought home three birds for supper with the first shot. He wanted to go to school to become an inventor. :) John Moses Browning was able to engineer and design in 3D in his brain; so incredible.
Colt, Winchester, FN, many gun manufacturers made guns designed by Browning. His mind was constantly creating and inventing.
Over two dozens of patents have been issued in his name and/or his brothers name (his partner). Guns that he had designed were manufactured for decades after his death.
So very glad that I had the opportunity to read this book.
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher (Scribner) and the author Nathan Gorenstein for the opportunity to read and review the advance read copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Publication date is scheduled for May 25, 2021.
August 28, 2021
One of the very few biographies about this prodigious and prolific inventor of pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns and assault rifles. Cover photograph is released to the public for the first time and shows the inventor firing his Browning Automatic Rifle at a gala demonstration in Washington, D.C. in early 1918. The author clearly explains the nuts and bolts of how Browning's guns operate but does not do so well in the latter part of the book with machine guns and the modifications of his M1911 pistol. After recounting Browning's death in 1925 the author describes the use of his inventions in the exploits of Sergeant York, Audie Murphy and other decorated servicemen. He also explains in great detail the role of the Browning machine guns in aerial combat over Britain and Germany, for example, a four-second burst from the six .50-caliber guns on a P-51 would deposit twenty-six pounds of lead and phosphorus into an area the size of a 2020 Ford Mustang coupe.
August 21, 2022
The book chronicles the achievements of the architect of the popular armaments of today; both civil and military. The amazing part of the story is how this uneducated young man in a small town was able to compete and eventually become the leader in his specific area of skill. He also had the vision to use all resources available to him; his entire family, siblings and nephews were enlisted as supporting cast for John’s genius in the making and working of guns.Also interesting is how John would not need to document his design; he could work and change these in his mind as he refined his designs. The book describes John’s business acumen together with his nationalistic streak; while patenting and winning legal battles on his patents he also lets the US military spell the terms for his bigger contracts. The author has done a great job in this biography of the ‘world’s greatest inventor of every successful automatic weapon principle’.
February 16, 2021
It makes me a little sad that many people won't bother with this fabulous book because it is about guns. It would surprise most that at one time Browning took his guns to Washington DC and 300 people including Congress and Senators fired them and were praising him. If you take the time to read the book, you will find the story of a man that was a prolific inventor. Browning rivaled Tesla in the number of patents he held. This is a well researched biography citing all sources for the information. The explanations of his inventions are simply written for "gun people" but for those who aren't, you will find explanations and descriptions that are easily understandable. Thank you #NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to voluntarily give my honest review of #TheGunsofJohnMosesBrowning.
August 10, 2021
A Colt 1911 was one of my first guns back in the last century. JMB was a very prolific inventor with over 128 patents. His guns for the most part were designed in the late 19th and early 20th century. And the designs are still in use today and/or copied now that patents are expired. The book explains his very first gun designed and built as a youth, 8 year patent dispute with Luger, almost 20 years connection to Winchester before switching to Fabrique Nationale (now FN Herstal). There are several chapters devoted just to the development of each type of firearm he created; single shot rifle, lever action rifles, pump shotguns then semi-automatic, pistols and machine guns. The book doesn't end with his death in 1926 but continues with stories of his guns being used in WWII; .50cal M2 (MaDuce) in Eighth Airforce in Europe and the Browning. 30cal Heavy Machine Gun in the Pacific battles.
July 3, 2021
I appreciated that this biography refrained from hagiography and, as it turned to the handguns that would for a time see ALL handguns referred to as "Brownings," reminded the reader of the horrifying human cost of the particular genius of John Browning. For better and for worse, his ability to see how firearms could rise to the cutting edge of metallurgical and chemical technology of the turn-of-the-20th-century had a particular role in the body count set in motion by the construction of the first Browning single-shot hunting rifle. Gorenstein notes the "for better" while not avoiding the tragically worse.
April 4, 2021
Wow! This is not my usual genre of books, but I have to say this was an interesting, well written, biography of a man who was brilliant.
He learned at a very early age how to create, fix and revamp rifles.
The Browning rife is his invention and one that is still used today.
In fact, my husband has this rifle and he uses it for hunting and loves it!
I learned a lot about this amazing man and time when he lived and how he survived!
This novel is told in amazing detail and very easy to follow even for people like myself, who had no idea about guns at all!
Well done!
He learned at a very early age how to create, fix and revamp rifles.
The Browning rife is his invention and one that is still used today.
In fact, my husband has this rifle and he uses it for hunting and loves it!
I learned a lot about this amazing man and time when he lived and how he survived!
This novel is told in amazing detail and very easy to follow even for people like myself, who had no idea about guns at all!
Well done!
November 21, 2024
If you live guns this is a book for you. I will say the Author called John Browning the ”Thomas Edison” of firearms which is the furthest thing from the truth. Thomas Edison was nothing more of an opportunist who took other peoples inventions and claimed them as his own. John Browning should be called the Nikolas Tesla of firearms as he could go from idea to finished product in his head and many of his firearms are used today my sportsmen and military alike and almost all firearms today incorporate what he used over 100 years ago.
June 11, 2022
Terrific history/biography of John Moses Browning and his inventions. The author took a few minor speculative liberties, guessing at motivations or possible actions when there was little or no evidence one way or the other. I thought I knew a lot about Browning and his designs, and some about his life, but I learned a fair amount that I hadn't previously known. Gorenstein has done some good research and his writing is clear and flows well. It was a worthwhile read.
June 30, 2022
A decent book on John Moses Browning and his inventions, while most of the book is a biography, His work with Winchester, his move to Leige Belgium to work with FN, etc
quite a significant chunk is just on the use of his inventions, here’s a bit on Audie Murphy, here’s a bit on the Battle of Britain, heck even Pennsylvania governor Candidate, Doug Mastriano makes an appearance in the book related to his work regarding Sgt. York.
quite a significant chunk is just on the use of his inventions, here’s a bit on Audie Murphy, here’s a bit on the Battle of Britain, heck even Pennsylvania governor Candidate, Doug Mastriano makes an appearance in the book related to his work regarding Sgt. York.
June 29, 2021
I think the story is somewhat "remarkable," that someone like Browning could have such a prolific mind about a specific subject ... Still, the overall telling is flat and, for the novice, there's just too much "caliber this" and "model number that"; loads about the man's accomplishments but not enough about the man
June 30, 2021
Entertaining, enlightening account of genius inventor. This book cries out for more illustrations. Many of the important concepts discussed in the book really need an illustration/picture. It is hard to picture a flapper valve without seeing one. I suspect it was editors who dropped the ball on this.
July 25, 2021
A comparatively light-hearted book, considering what I usually read.
The Guns of John Moses Browning does an excellent job of doing three things: talking about Browning and his family in human terms, discussing the mechanical aspects of firearms both his and beyond, and covering the world affairs driving the firearms market.
The Guns of John Moses Browning does an excellent job of doing three things: talking about Browning and his family in human terms, discussing the mechanical aspects of firearms both his and beyond, and covering the world affairs driving the firearms market.
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