John Moses Browning, Gunsmith of the World
Near Ogden, Utah
The workshop where John Moses Browning grew up was his father Jonathan's gunsmithing shop on the corner of Grant Avenue and Twenty-Fifth Street, and from the time he could reach the workbench he was learning to understand how a firearm worked from the inside out. Jonathan Browning was already a respected gunsmith. His son would become the most prolific and consequential firearms designer in American history.
John Moses Browning was born in Ogden on January twenty-third, eighteen fifty-five. He had little formal schooling. His education was at that workbench. At the age of twenty-four he received his first patent, in October eighteen seventy-nine, for a single-shot rifle. Winchester Repeating Arms bought the patent in eighteen eighty-three. Browning went on to sell Winchester the designs for the Model eighteen eighty-six lever-action rifle, the Model eighteen ninety-four, and the Model eighteen ninety-seven shotgun, a list of commercially successful firearms that remade Winchester's entire product line.
But his military designs are what changed the world. The Colt nineteen eleven, the standard sidearm of the United States military from nineteen eleven until nineteen eighty-six, was a Browning design. The Browning Automatic Rifle, the BAR, the squad-level automatic weapon that went to France in nineteen seventeen and stayed in American arsenals through Korea, was a Browning design. The M two fifty-caliber machine gun, which remained in service for the entire twentieth century and is still in use today, was a Browning design. He held one hundred twenty-eight firearms patents in total. Some estimates put the number of weapons manufactured from his designs across his lifetime and beyond at fifty million.
John Moses Browning died in Liege, Belgium, in November nineteen twenty-six, at the age of seventy-one, at the workbench of the Fabrique Nationale plant where he had gone to finish a new pistol design. He died working.
The museum inside Union Station here holds over ninety original prototypes from his shop. They are the actual objects he made with his hands in this city.
