American Rifleman by Nathan Gorenstein May 25, 2021
Anything a person might want to learn about handling a John Moses Browning firearm can be found online. You can learn how to load, fix and shoot one, and you can study how it was used throughout history. From single-shot rifles for hunting elk back in 19th-century Utah to the M2 .50-cal. machine gun used to assault Taliban strongholds in 21st-century Afghanistan, Browning-designed firearms have been there and done that. What you couldn’t learn, until now, though, was how those firearms came to be invented—at least not in the words of the men who actually did the “inventing.”
While John Moses Browning came up with the ideas, the task of translating them into steel prototypes for manufacturers such as Winchester, Colt, and Fabrique Nationale in Belgium was a brotherly endeavor. In previously unknown early 20th century documents, Browning, his brother Matthew and half-brother Jonathan “Ed” describe that creative process in their own words. They allow a first-hand look into how Browning used his extraordinary ability to think in three dimensions to create mechanical systems ranging from tiny pocket pistols for self-defense to five-foot long aerial machine guns.
Browning’s impact on American firearm culture and world history can hardly be overstated. His light, accurate and famous Winchester “.30-30” hunting rifle and pump-action shotguns dominated the American market, while in Europe more than 1.25 million Browning pistols were sold between 1899 and 1914. In fact, a Serbian assassin used his Model 1910 to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand and ignite World War I. Decades later, the RAF fighters that won the Battle of Britain were armed with Browning guns chosen for their remarkable reliability. Indeed, during World War II, every battle Americans fought on land or in the air was fought with Browning's inventions: the 1911 pistol, the Browning Automatic Rifle, his tripod-mounted .30-cal. machine gun and the powerful, long-range M2. Some troops were even armed with a Browning shotgun design dating to 1893.
So how did he do it? To Browning, objects were ideas. He had the unique ability to visualize and manipulate objects in his head, enabling him to go from mind to metal. Remarkably, he never used blueprints. The modern world calls it “spatial thinking,” and we utilize a rudimentary version of that skill when packing a suitcase, as we fold shirts, pants, socks and jackets into shapes that fit the container. Advanced spatial thinking includes “mental rotation,” the ability to imagine three-dimensional objects and rotate them left and right or up or down. And then there is, “spatial realization,” involving “multi-step manipulations” of the objects in your mind.
For John Browning, that native skill was amplified by years spent working in the frontier town of Ogden, Utah, under the tutelage of his father, gunsmith Jonathan Browning. In 1865, at age 10, the young inventor built a primitive shotgun out of abandoned gun parts, only to be scolded by his father—not for stealing scarce powder to shoot three wildfowl but for making such a crude weapon.
Thinking through a new firearm mechanism could be a slow process. Granddaughter Judy Jones Browning, whose father was Browning’s youngest son, Val, said that her mother, Ann, watched her father-in-law sit lost in thought during evening visits, tapping his fingers on the side of his bald head, watching mechanisms working in his mind, “until he drove my mother crazy.”
Because none of Browning’s American-made firearms carried his name, the public first encountered him in World War I, when the Army adopted his Browning Automatic Rifle and .30-cal. machine gun. The popular press labeled him the “Thomas Edison” of firearms, though unlike Edison, Browning sought no publicity. He never gave a formal interview, and he kept no diary. After his death, there was no documentation of his work for historians to pore over. Browning left no drawings or blueprints because he never used them. Exactly how a Browning idea became a working firearm had never been fully understood.
More:
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/thinking-in-three-dimensions-the-genius-of-john-moses-browning/
