Words of Wisdom from SharLeigh
A LEGENDARY GUNSMITH
AND INVENTOR
John Moses Browning (1855-1926) was one of the most ingenious gunsmiths of all time, influencing nearly all categories of firearms design. John was the eldest son of a Mormon gunsmith in Ogden, Utah. By the time John was six, he was assisting his father in his gunsmith shop, and at ten years of age he was able to take scrap metal that was lying around the shop and create his first firearm. When he was 16, a freight driver gave him a severely damaged shotgun – with great care and ingenuity he dissembled the wrecked firearm and was able to repair or rebuild all the damaged parts. With this new-found confidence, Mr. Browning began building his own guns and went on to make firearms history. 
When he was 28, a traveling salesman from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company purchased one of Browning’s single-shot rifles. The salesman was so impressed with his work that he showed the rifle to the President of Winchester, and from there it lead to a 19-year business agreement. In the first eight years of that agreement, John sold 20 new designs to Winchester. During Mr. Browning’s lifetime he designed firearms for Winchester, his own company (Browning), Remington, Savage, Fabrique National (in Belgium) and Colt. Browning, who built 80 different firearms and was the most important figure in the development of modern automatic and semi-automatic firearms, is credited with 128 gun patents. Browning’s most successful designs include the Colt M1911 semi-automatic pistol (see photo), the Browning .50 caliber machine gun, the Browning Automatic Rifle, and a ground-breaking semi-automatic shotgun, the Browning Auto-5. All of these designs are still in production today, more than 80 years after their inventor’s death. The U.S. military used the M1911 pistol as their official sidearm for decades until it was replaced in 1985, but it is still manufactured and reproduced today, making it one of the best selling and most copied pistols of all time.