See Related: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XXIV - Two Great Gun Designers and What Happened When They Met

But he came from surprisingly humble beginnings – and he personified those beginnings throughout his life. Born in Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1855, to Jonathan Browning, a gunsmith, and… well, that’s complicated. Old Jonathan Browning was a Mormon, and in 1855, he was a polygamist with three wives. With his three wives, he had 22 children, one of which was John, and while some records indicate his mother was Elizabeth Caroline Browning née Clark (no relation) the record is a bit muddled.

At age seven, John began working in his father’s gunsmith shop in Ogden, and he took to the trade swiftly. While still working for his father he built the first Browning firearm, a single-shot falling-block rifle. You can still view that rifle along with a few examples of old Jonathan’s work in the Browning Museum in Ogden.

In 1878, John struck out on his own, founding what would become the Browning Arms Company. Several of John’s brothers joined the firm in time, and they started out producing guns for the civilian trade. But John was a designer first and foremost, and his first commercial piece, the 1878 falling block rifle, caught the eye of the Winchester Repeating Arms company. That association was to prove long and fruitful, although John maintained his own company and worked with other gun manufacturers as well, including Winchester’s rivals, Colt and Remington.

Millions of Browning-designed firearms were built and, indeed, are still being built today.

Sadly, the building that originally housed the “Browning Bros” arms company still stands in Ogden today, a few blocks from the Browning Museum. When I was there in 2015, this historic building stood empty, with the letters “Browning Bros” still visible in the patina on the storefront.

Of course, one of the Maestro’s most rewarding associations was with the Belgian firm Fabrique Nationale (FN) who not only produced many of the Browning Arms Company’s civilian designs – I have a modest collection of Belgian Brownings myself – but a lot of his military designs. In fact, one of Browning’s final works was still in the design process when he died in 1926, was completed by an FN designer, one Dieudonné Saive, and was released as the FN GP35 but is better known as the Browning Hi-Power. Another design that John Browning left unfinished was his over-under shotgun design, also a unique item in those days; this design was completed by John’s son, Val Browning, who took over Browning Arms Company after John’s death. That shotgun was to become the famous Superposed.

In an interesting twist of fate, FN, along with the rest of Belgium, was overrun by the Germans, and the company and its workers were forced to produce firearms, including some of Browning’s designs, for Nazi Germany. Some of the commercial designs were built in the United States during this interval; I have one such, a 12-gauge Auto-5 built by Remington. These guns are known as the “American Auto-5s,” and Remington need not do much retooling to build them, as the Remington Model 11 was a licensed copy of the Auto-5 sans the magazine block. These guns are not marked “Remington” but properly “Browning,” and one of the few ways to distinguish an American Auto-5 is by the serial number.

John Browning’s home in Ogden, the John Moses Browning House, is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Throughout his career, John Browning designed guns for Winchester, Colt, Remington, Savage, Stevens, and FN, as well as for his own Browning Arms Company.

See Related: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XII - John Browning's 'Other' Shotgun

But what’s not widely known is that the Maestro fiddled around a lot with his designs before finalizing them; he was something of a one-man skunk works, playing with designs until they were perfect. And you can’t argue with this success. Case in point: Most gun folks are familiar with the Auto-5, one of John Browning’s most famous inventions. But it wasn’t his first semi-auto shotgun. There are two prototypes, hand-made by the man himself, of a semi-auto shotgun based on a toggle action – yes, that’s right, like a Luger.

Browning was concerned about infringing on the Borchardt/Luger design, so instead produced the first prototype of what became the immortal Auto-5. The original didn’t have a handle on the bolt, but rather, the bolt was (oddly) connected by an operating rod to a handle on the underside of the stock. That was an oddity that Browning corrected in the second prototype, which led to the production models.

His list of design achievements is legendary:

Cartridges

• .25 ACP
• .32 ACP
• .38 ACP
• .380 ACP
• .45 ACP
• .50 BMG
• 9mm Browning Long

Handguns

• FN M1899/M1900 (.32 ACP)
• Colt Model 1900 (.38 ACP)
• Colt Model 1902 (.38 ACP)
• Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammer (.38 ACP)
• FN Model 1903 (9mm Browning Long)
• Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless (.32 ACP)
• FN Model 1906 Vest Pocket (.25 ACP)
• Colt Model 1908 Vest Pocket (.25 ACP)
• Colt Model 1908 Pocket Hammerless (.380 ACP)
• FN Model 1910 (.32 ACP, .380 ACP)
• U.S. M1911 pistol (.45 ACP)
• Browning Hi-Power (9mm Parabellum)
• Colt Woodsman pistol (.22 LR)

Shotguns

• Savage Model 720 long-recoil semi-automatic shotgun
• Ithaca Model 37 pump-action repeating shotgun
• Stevens Model 520/620 pump-action repeating shotgun
• Winchester Model 1887 lever-action repeating shotgun
• Winchester Model 1893 pump-action repeating shotgun
• Winchester Model 1897 pump-action repeating shotgun
• Winchester Model 1912 pump-action repeating shotgun (actually designed by T.C. Johnson but based on the 1897 Winchester)
• Browning Auto-5 long-recoil semi-automatic shotgun
• Browning Superposed over/under shotgun
• Remington Model 17 pump-action repeating shotgun

Rifles

• Winchester Model 1885 falling-block single-shot rifle
• Winchester Model 1886 lever-action repeating rifle
• Winchester Model 1890 slide-action repeating rifle (.22 LR)
• Winchester Model 1892 lever-action repeating rifle
• Winchester Model 1894 lever-action repeating rifle
• Winchester Model 1895 lever-action repeating rifle
• Winchester Model 1900 bolt-action single-shot rifle (.22 LR)
• Remington Model 8 semi-auto rifle
• Browning 22 Semi-Auto rifle (.22 LR)
• Remington Model 24 semi-auto rifle (.22 LR)
• FN Trombone pump-action rifle (.22 LR)

Crew-Served Arms

• U.S. M1895 air-cooled gas-operated machine gun
• U.S. M1917 water-cooled recoil-operated machine gun
• U.S. M1919 air-cooled recoil-operated machine gun
• U.S. M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR)
• U.S. M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun
• U.S. M4 37mm Automatic Gun

John Browning, without a doubt, had more influence and created more successful designs than any other single person in the history of firearms. Many of his designs are still in wide use today and probably will be still in wide use a century from now. His 1911 pistol and its cousin, the Hi-Power, remain today as two of the best martial sidearms in existence. The Winchester pump shotguns and lever-action rifles he designed are gold standards. The M2 .50 caliber machine gun is one of the longest-serving crew-served weapons in military history.

The man was a prodigy, and we won’t see another like him any time soon.