There was, as yet, no established market for self-loading pistols in the U.S.īrowning’s first pistol patent was filed on 14 September 1895 and was followed just over a year later by three pistol patents filed on 31 October 1896.

However, Colt’s was almost certainly acquiring the rights in order to protect sales of their revolvers. The right to manufacture four of his automatic pistol designs for distribution in the U.S. On 24 July 1896 Browning signed a contract giving Colt’s Producing one of Browning’s machine gun designs, which marked the beginning of a long collaboration between John Browning and the Colt’s Company. In 1895 the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company began

By 1894 Browning had completed his first prototype automatic pistol. Various types of self-loading weapons, both gas and recoil operated. He filed a patent on a gas-operated machine gun on 6 January 1890, and followed it with another dozen or so patents over the next decade on He filed his first firearm patent in 1879 at the age of 24.īrowning began experimenting with self-loading weapon designs late in 1889. John Moses Browning (1855-1926) grew up in his father’s gun shop and learned to repair guns before he learned to read and write. Self-loading pistols had limited sales and/or were intended primarily for military use. The most significant successful designs (other than John Browning’s) were those by Mannlicher, Bergmann, and Mauser. Number of people began serious work on designs for self-loading guns. But immediately after the invention of smokeless powder, a None of these efforts were ultimately viable because of the heavy residues left by black powder, which inhibits mechanical functioning very quickly.

It burns much faster than black powder and produces comparatively little smoke, so it quickly became known as “smokeless” powder.Ī number of attempts to create a self-loading (automatic) weapon were made prior to the invention of smokeless powder, including a gas-operated revolver made by Orbea Hermanos of Eibar, Spain as early asġ863. He called his invention poudre blanche, or white powder, to distinguish it from traditional black But in 1884 the French chemist Paul Marie Eugène Vieille found a way to stabilize it. Guncotton is highly flammable and chemically unstable, so early efforts to utilize it as a gunpowder ingredient or explosive caused some seriousĭisasters. Guncotton, or nitrocellulose, made by dipping cotton in a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids, was patented in 1846 by a Swiss chemist by the name of Christian Friedrich Schönbein, based on earlier work byįrench chemists Henry Braconnot and Théophile-Jules Pelouze.

Fn 1905 grip screw with echelon