When the late physicist Stephen Hawking was working on his book, A Brief History of Time, his publisher told him that each equation he used would cut the book sales in half. He rolled the dice and risked it, including just one equation. The book was a success, and when it came time to update it to a second edition, he included a second equation. I’m no Hawking, but I will resist putting in equations unless necessary. And I’ll try to be brief.
You may hear 1911 fans talk about “Saint John” or “The Mormon Genius.” The period we’re looking at here is the last decade of the 19th century. Smokeless powder was still new but was around long enough that gunmakers were now comfortable with it. A self-loading pistol would be the hot new property to make some lucky somebody rich. The bolt-action rifle had been perfected (several times, in fact). While the double-action revolver was a good thing, Smith & Wesson had revealed in 1898 the frame that would become the K-Frame and the .38 Special to go with it—a self-loading pistol would be a real money-maker.
The only problem was design. And the designers of the age were stuck in the “receiver and breechblock” paradigm. The exemplar here would be the Luger, which was a receiver with a barrel screwed into it, just like rifles, and used a breechblock that cycled inside of the receiver. Another was the Mauser Broomhandle, the C96. Again, a barrel in a receiver and a cyclical breech-block. The difference is that the Luger breechblock locks itself, and the C96 locks to the lower frame.
Along came John Moses Browning. He had been designing rifles and shotguns for Winchester for 15 years, and his latest was a self-loading shotgun. He wanted to make some real money with this one and spurned the customary process of a flat fee from Winchester for the design. He wanted royalties, a piece of the action.
