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  The Gatling gun could fire continuously, but it was heavy, became overheated, and required cranking. The Maxim gun, patented in 1883 and introduced in 1886, was a portable machine gun that needed only one barrel to fire all of its bullets automatically—theoretically, for as long as the user had ammunition. It would not be the equivalent of ten soldiers; it would be the equivalent of an army.

  This kind of firearm technology was a near-inconceivable improvement. How did it work? Maxim had designed a groundbreaking toggle mechanism that, when fired, remained locked until the bullet left the gun, but when recoiling it unlocked the bolt to let the next bullet fire. Another lever, called the accelerator, ejected the used cartridge case and grabbed a new one from the fabric belt that fed it. The energy made the bolt cock the firing pin, load a new cartridge, and fire. The speed in which the gun could do this through one barrel created much heat. But Maxim solved this problem with a water jacket, a metal tube that surrounded the barrel and was filled with cool water.9

  The trials for the new gun were widely attended by European military leaders—and extensively celebrated. “It is really wonderful,” one of Britain’s leading military men, Sir Garnet Wolseley, told Maxim. “You Yankees beat all creation. There seems to be no limit to what you are able to do.”10 When seeing the gun shoot 333 rounds in one minute, Kaiser Wilhelm II exclaimed in 1887, “This is the gun, there is no other.” Not only was the Maxim gun consistently lighter than military leaders assumed, but it was faster, more accurate, and exceptionally durable. In one test by Italian officers, the Maxim was submerged in the sea for three days. When the gun was recovered, it was not cleaned, and yet it performed as well as it had before. One of the downsides, a few military leaders observed, was how well it worked. They saw the efficiency as a waste of cartridges, a needless expense.

  It should be noted that there was another ongoing technical advance—conveniently, a Maxim patent—that would make the machine gun even more threatening. Because no matter how quickly or accurately a soldier fired his gun, no matter where he hid, his position was almost always given away by the resulting plume of smoke generated by black powder.

  There had been many stabs at fixing the problem. A few years earlier a Swiss chemist named Christian Friedrich Schönbein had conceived of “guncotton”—a form of smokeless powder that was made by soaking cotton in sulfuric and nitric acids—to mitigate the problem, but although it was more potent than black powder, with little resulting smoke when fired, it was also unstable in heat, unreliable, and dangerous. In 1865 a Prussian artilleryman created a more propellant smokeless powder by mixing nitrocellulose with barium nitrate.11 In 1885 a French chemist named Paul Vicille experimented with gelatinized nitroglycerine, which not only eliminated the black plume of smoke but left little or no residue. Then there was Alfred Nobel, the noted inventor of dynamite, who, experimenting with a safer, commercially viable form of nitroglycerin, developed a smokeless powder in 1887. As an outgrowth of those experiments, guncotton was replaced with nitroglycerin. (Maxim, as he did with most of his competitors, quarreled with Nobel, who also claimed to be the first to patent the smokeless powder.)

  It was Hudson Maxim, Hiram’s younger brother and employee, who would work on numerous innovations, including a delayed-action detonating fuse and the aptly named “Maximite,” an explosive more robust than dynamite. A chemist by trade, Hudson refined smokeless powder and, depending on whom you listen to, concocted a far more stable recipe called, appropriately enough, “stabillite.” With an inventor named R. C. Schupphaus, they developed a smokeless powder that was first adopted by the U.S. government.12

  Despite all these advances, Maxim initially struggled at the gun trade. For one thing, there was the Nordenfelt company, one of the leading arms dealers in Europe, which dependably stole his ideas and undermined his business efforts. Perhaps tired of losing these commercial battles, Maxim joined with Nordenfelt in 1888 to form the Maxim-Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company. From then on Maxim’s machine would be made famous by the maneuverings of the enigmatic Sir Basil Zaharoff, a Turkish-born Greek who claimed to be a Frenchman. Zaharoff was a master salesman whose wily and often unethical tactics made Maxim wealthy.

  Working with Nordenfelt, selling armaments and also things like unusable submarines to small nations, Zaharoff successfully sabotaged many of Maxim’s prospects over the ensuing years.13 (Despite Zaharoff’s role in selling the machine gun worldwide, Maxim doesn’t mention him once in his autobiography.) Sometimes referred to as the “merchant of death,” Zaharoff armed many of the great conflicts of his day—often both sides of them. By 1896 the Maxim-Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company was bought out by Vickers Ltd., and Maxim became a Vickers director. Soon the Vickers machine gun, based on Maxim’s design, was standard issue in the British Army.

  It was in the First Matabele War in 1893–94, which pitted the Ndebele Kingdom (in what is now Zimbabwe) against British police, that Europeans would first use the Maxim gun on an opposing army. It immediately proved exceptionally deadly. In one engagement, fifty soldiers with four Maxim guns fought off 5,000 Ndebele warriors, losing only four men. At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, British general Herbert Kitchener annihilated the massive forces of the revolutionary Abdullah al-Taashi—also known as “the Khalifa”—within mere hours. The machine gun gave Europeans an immense technological advantage over their colonial holdings. Once these armies met others with similar technology, the outcomes were predictably horrifying.

  Soon other European powers wanted their own machine guns, and Maxim would sell them to anyone who could afford them. He wryly noted that “the Russians have purchased vast numbers of Maxim guns, and it has been asserted by those who ought to know that more than half of the Japanese killed in the late war [the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905] were killed with the little Maxim gun.”14 The Russians adapted the gun, helpfully naming it the Pulemyot Maxima Obraztsa 1910—literally, “Maxim’s Machine Gun Model of 1910.” The Germans, England’s future archenemies, licensed the system from Maxim in 1908 and created the Maschinengewehr 08. Thousands were produced in the nation’s armor works in Spandau, and the model became the machine gun of the German army during the First World War. At the start of the war Germany had two hundred of Maxim’s Maschinengewehre. By the end of the war they were producing over 14,000 every month.15

  Lord Salisbury pointed out that Maxim was one of the “greatest benefactors the world has ever known.” How so? the inventor asked. “I should say that you have prevented more men from dying of old age than any other man that ever lived,” Salisbury answered.16

  Maxim, the man from Maine who had changed the world, died of old age in November 1916, only days after the Battle of the Somme, where, bogged down in trench warfare imbued with machine guns, the French and British armies attempted to break through German lines on the Western Front. The ensuing battle, which lasted more than four and a half months, resulted in 1.5 million men perishing—many of them mowed down by the machine he invented. But it would only get bloodier. At the time of Maxim’s death, the United States was debating whether to enter into the Great War, and one American was already working on the ideas that would not only render Maxim guns antiquated but define firearms to this day.

  16

  AMERICAN GENIUS

  “The greatest firearms inventor the world has ever known.”

  —Plaque in front of the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre Herstal, near Liège, Belgium

  John M. Browning’s son Lt. Val Browning with the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, 1918

  On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, pulled a Browning pistol from his coat and shot twice, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg. Before the nineteen-year-old was able to turn the gun on himself, a group of bystanders standing nearby on the Sarajevo street tackled him and grabbed the gun. The scene was mayhem. Franz Ferdinand’s bloody undershirt and Princip’s gun would end up in the hands of a Jesuit p
riest named Anton Puntigam, a close friend, who had performed the blood-soaked last rites on the archduke and his wife. Puntigam later gave the gun that “killed 8.5 million people” to the Jesuits for preservation. It is now on permanent display at the Museum of Military History in Vienna.

  The repercussions of this event, well-known and massive, would embroil millions and change the world forever. Yet we would be remiss not to point out that even a bumbling assassin with a half-baked plan needed only two shots from an FN Browning Model 1910 to plunge the world into conflict. The Browning pistol, after all, was one of the most reliable and sturdy handguns ever produced. What makes the gun even more amazing is that it was one of about a dozen game-changing inventions concocted by its inventor, John Browning.

  In one way or another, Browning’s ideas played a part in nearly every conflict in the twentieth century as he invented and conceptualized the modern gun. The rest would merely be tinkering and streamlining his foundational ideas. Browning brought his creations to a host of gun manufacturers around the world, and those gunmakers who didn’t work with him would copy him. By the end of his career, the man from Utah had a say in virtually every category of firearms in existence: rifles, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and cannons.

  Unlike many other great American gunmakers, Browning was himself the son of a gunsmith. His father, Jonathan, was born in the frontier town of Brushy Fork in Bledsoe Creek, Tennessee, the year Thomas Jefferson was sworn in for a second term as president. His family traced its roots to Captain John Browning, a soldier and explorer who had ventured to North America in 1622 and become head of one of the first families established in Virginia. Growing up in a deeply rural area, the elder Browning did not benefit from any formal schooling and, like his successful contemporary Sam Colt, experienced a childhood without much parental interference. He became fascinated by firearms at an early age and was a self-taught gunsmith by nineteen.

  Like many young men of his time and place, Jonathan Browning moved with the currents of American destiny—which is to say westward. His first stop was Quincy, Mississippi, where he began taking advantage of some of the technological innovations filtering down from the Northeast’s gunmakers. For example, he tested new percussion caps and attempted to invent his own multi-shot rifle. His version relied on a rectangular bar—something like a harmonica—that held five or six chambered balls with a design that featured a hammer underneath the lock, swinging upward. Although fairly popular among locals, like many of Jonathan Browning’s early stabs at repeating guns, it remained cumbersome to load and was never patented.

  During this period, Mormon missionaries entered Browning’s shop and began converting him to the faith founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York in the 1820s. It wasn’t long before Jonathan, swayed by the group’s sense of community, packed up his wife, two kids, and belongings and moved to the Mormon community in nearby Nauvoo, Illinois. There he immersed himself in the church and made himself a valuable member of the community by repairing and making guns. When Browning asked Brigham Young if he could join his coreligionists headed to fight in the brewing Mexican-American conflict, the leader of the Latter-Day Saints told him, “I need you here.” Soon enough, Browning would trek to the newly minted Mormon community of Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1852.

  Jonathan took the then-Mormon tradition of polygamy seriously, marrying twice more. He was no less negligent in his duty to be fruitful and multiply, siring twenty-two children. Among them was John Moses Browning, born on January 23, 1855. John often stood out as a precocious and friendly boy. In his teens, John and three of his brothers worked as “jobbers,” repairing all types of items for the family business. An industrious child, John took on various jobs, including working as a tanner. By the time he had finished school at fifteen, not an uncommon age at the time, Browning had already begun constructing makeshift guns assembled from discarded parts left by the colorful pioneer characters who passed through his father’s blacksmith shop.

  “A man might come in with an old gun, hoping to raise a little money on it,” said one of his younger brothers years later. “Pappy would take one look and shake his head. There was nothing more discouraging than Pappy looking solemn and shaking his head. ‘That’s a dead mule’ was one of his favorite expressions. The man may have hoped to get a couple of dollars for that gun but dead mule would jolt him down a dollar at least. Finally, Pappy would say, ‘Well, maybe I can use the hammer sometime.’ If you want four bits for it, pitch it on the junk pile yonder.”1

  John created many of his early firearms from these “dead mules,” as it became obvious early on that the boy had a gift. He made particularly impressive use of his father’s lathe (the family would claim theirs was the largest west of the Mississippi), a tool that rotated on its axis to perform various fabrications like cutting, sanding, knurling, and drilling. It was from this tool that many of Browning’s inventions sprung, including his first rifle.

  At some point in his early twenties, John got his hands on a breech-loading rifle and immediately went about trying to improve the design. In 1879, the year he turned twenty-four, John married, his father passed away, and he won the first of his 130 lifetime patents. This one, a design for a single-shot breech-loading rifle, still sits in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. It’s the gun that launched his career.

  “You can’t get anywhere without coming to Ogden,” claimed the city’s chamber of commerce in the late 1800s. For those headed west, this was often true. In Ogden the transcontinental railroad tracks from the east would join tracks being laid from the west. By 1869, the first locomotive steamed into Ogden, and the citizens of the city welcomed the train with a ceremony that evening with banners that read “Hail to the Highway of the Nations! Utah Bids You Welcome.” Many thousands of newcomers moved through the frontier hub. Many needed guns. Browning and his brothers met that demand as skillful and popular assemblers of rifles in the center of the railroad town. Using heavy, reliable Remington barrels, they ended up producing around five hundred firearms from 1880 to 1883, constructing them to comport with government-issue .45–70 rounds and Sharps .32–40 rounds. A number of their customers took their guns into the heart of West, where the Browning reputation grew.

  By 1883, western arms dealers from major eastern manufacturers were already crisscrossing the frontier, selling their guns and replacement parts to gunsmiths and general stores. As the legend goes, one of these men, a Winchester agent named Andrew McAusland, would, during his travels, come across a rifle stamped “BROWNING BROS. OGDEN, UTAH U.S.A.” with the serial number 463.2

  Two things about the robust rifle immediately caught the man’s attention. First was the serial number, which, though not too large, was large enough to indicate there was budding competition in the Utah railroad town. Second, and more concerning to McAusland, was the impressive durability of the rifle, which had obviously seen heavy use but still functioned flawlessly.3 So concerned was McAusland, in fact, that he sent the rifle back to his bosses at Winchester. Within weeks the company’s vice president, T. G. Bennett, got on a train in New Haven and made his way to Ogden, which he would describe as a “vast plain of wind and rocks completely indescribable in its unattractiveness,” to purchase the rights to the gun.

  A mechanical engineer himself, Bennett was initially skeptical that these brothers, most of whom were barely shaving, could have designed and produced such a potent weapon. Conversely, it did not escape John Browning’s attention that an executive from one of the largest gun manufacturers in the country was beckoning. So the budding capitalist asked for $10,000 for his gun, but accepted the tidy sum of $8,000 for the right to manufacture his design.

  While Winchester had been one of the dominant producers of repeating rifles, at the time they had no single-shot rifles to offer. This one would certainly do. What really excited Bennett, however, were the other ideas that came pouring out of John. When Bennett asked the inventor if he could design a lever-action repeating shotgun, Browning,
never one to lack self-confidence, explained that he could and would, but that he had even better things in mind. “Yes, I’ve thought a good deal about a lever shotgun,” Browning answered. “I think it would sell. But a slide-action gun would be easier to operate and better looking. I think I have one worked out now that’s pretty good.”

  Browning patented his first pump model shotgun in 1887.

  This would be the start of a twenty-year collaboration between the gun designer and Winchester. “When back in New Haven I had a gun of each model made up in the finest finish and sent them to the brothers. For many years and many new models, amounting to thousands of dollars, the mutual word or a handshake was sufficient to seal a bargain between the brothers and Winchester,” Bennett would later recall. Browning’s association with Winchester continued until 1902 and included single-shot rifles, lever-action and pump-action shotguns, and lever-action rifles.

  Winchester engineers often made minor improvements to Browning’s first design, calling it the Winchester Model 1885 Single Shot Rifle. The company sold the “High Wall,” a big receiver that covered most of the breech block from the side and was intended for large, powerful cartridges, and the “Low Wall” version, which was intended for less powerful cartridges like the .22 as well as the pistol cartridges of the day.4 “It can be furnished with or without set triggers,” Winchester boasted, “with barrels of all ordinary lengths and weights, and for all standard cartridges; also with rifle and shotgun butt, plain or fancy wood, or with pistol grip.” The company made 140,000 of these guns from 1885 to 1920. (Winchester would reintroduce the gun in 2005.) Browning’s Winchester Model 1894, the first repeating rifle to use smokeless powder, went on to become one of the most popular and notable ever produced, remaining in continuous production from its inception until 2006, with sales of more than 7 million guns.