Colt, Gatling, and Browning | Gun Pioneers
There are two extremes usually brought up in any conversation about America’s gun culture. The first is a parent and child on a hunting trip or at a shooting range where they develop a closer bond while firing rounds at animals or paper targets; the second is the deranged or depressed soul who walks into a shopping mall, a theater, or a school and murders innocent men, women, and children. Both happen in this country, and both will probably continue to happen regardless of what our political leaders say and do. Speaking personally, some of my closest relationships have grown deeper and more special at gun ranges, and I have wept openly and without shame when hearing stories of mass shootings and suicides, especially among those closest to me. In this episode, and what I expect will be a lively and productive discussion next week, I want to talk about some of the pioneers in America’s firearms industry, and I hope you will join in the conversation by sending us questions and comments this week.
God created man. Colonel Colt made them equal.
- Popular saying in the American Old West -
Samuel Colt’s name is forever linked to the company he founded and the revolver he called the “Peacemaker.” Born in Connecticut in 1814, he was steeped in America’s gun culture from an early age. His grandfather had served in George Washington’s army, and Samuel inherited an old flintlock pistol from the family hero when he was only six. At the age of fifteen, while working in his father’s textile plant, he built a galvanic cell (basically an early battery) and used it to set off explosives beneath the surface of a nearby pond during the Fourth of July. He continued to experiment with chemicals and combustion—as many young men do—and became fascinated by inventors’ work to create a firearm that could shoot more than bullet before needing to reload.
Twenty years before Colt’s birth, the American inventor Eli Whitney had developed a process to mass-produce firearm parts instead of making them by hand. For centuries, any damage to a musket in battle rendered it useless, but a soldier could now repair his weapon with a spare part and just a bit of training. Colt built on Whitney’s work and that of the Bostonian Elisha Collier, inventor of a revolving flintlock, and received his first patent from the U.S. government in 1836 for a cost-effective repeating firearm (the world’s first, since Collier’s had been too expensive to be anything more than a novelty). Setbacks plagued him for decades, but funding from Washington and support from Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers (who bought a thousand Colt revolvers in 1847) gave him the means to found the Colt Manufacturing Company that same year.
Two of Colt’s inventions earned him immortality in the firearms community. The first was the 1857 Navy revolver, carried by legends of the Old West like “Wild Bill” Hickok, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and “Doc” Holliday. Officers on both sides of the American Civil War carried these revolvers and used them regularly on the battlefield. Far more famous was the 1873 Single Action Army revolver, the “Peacemaker.” This weapon (basically the “grand-daddy” of all modern revolvers) played a pivotal role in America’s wars with indigenous tribes on the Great Plains. It fired six shots before needing to be reloaded and was very popular with cavalrymen who could shoot it one-handed. Colt eventually licensed the design to other manufacturers. It is still being made and sold in the United States today, and its place in modern popular culture is fixed in many Western films like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, True Grit, and Tombstone.
During the Civil War, the Confederate General (and future Ku Klux Klan founder) Nathan Bedford Forrest commented that victory belonged to the side that could “get there first with the most men.” Though this remains true to this day, Samuel Colt’s “Peacemaker” and other repeating firearms modified this truism. When armies carried weapons that fired only a single shot at a time, numbers were the deciding factor. After the Civil War, however, and thanks to Colt and the next two subjects of this podcast, victory increasingly went to the side that got to the battlefield with the most bullets, not men.
It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could, by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent, supersede the necessity of large armies and, consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.
- Richard Gatling, 1877 -
Richard Jordan Gatling was a North Carolina native who devoted his life to inventing time-saving devices for his customers. His patents included equipment allowing farmers to plant and harvest crops more quickly, propellers for steamships that got passengers to their destinations in less time, and household products like more efficient toilets, better bicycles, and even an early steam-powered commercial vacuum cleaner. Of course, the invention he is best-known for is the one that bears his name: the Gatling gun.
In 1861, while living in Indianapolis, Richard Gatling was working on what he hoped would be a time-saving device for soldiers. He was not a pacifist, as some later biographers claimed, but he believed that war was a futile endeavor and wanted to create something that would allow governments to send fewer soldiers into battle. He patented the Gatling gun in November 1862, nearly two years into America’s deadliest war. It was a wheeled artillery piece that looked similar to a field gun but fired small-arms caliber bullets instead of a single large explosive shell. The gun’s crew fired it by turning a crank, and the six barrels rotated with each turn and fired rounds as quickly as the operator’s arm could move.
Though not technically a fully-automatic machine gun, its tremendous rate of fire kept enemy soldiers huddled in their trenches during the siege of Petersburg in 1864, and improved models devastated America’s enemies on the Great Plains and in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. (Interestingly, General George Armstrong Custer refused to bring Gatling guns along during the 7th Cavalry Regiment’s attack at the Little Bighorn River in 1876, which turned out disastrously for the Americans.) Other nations copied Gatling’s design, and hand-cranked artillery remained a staple of Western militaries until the First World War. Newer inventions eventually replaced the Gatling gun in widespread use, though fully-automatic variants continued in service on attack helicopters and the A-10 “Thunderbolt” fighter-bomber (personally, my favorite military aircraft of all time), and in action movies like Predator.
The Gatling gun was a key factor in changing tactics on the battlefield. With the advent of trench warfare in the Civil War and World War One, as well as the later use of “foxholes” in World War Two, suppressing fire replaced massed volleys from armies marching in lines and columns. Automatic weapons are not, as often seen on film and in video games, used for aimed fire when an enemy is visible. Recoil makes this impossible, as anyone who has ever shot a high-powered rifle knows. Instead, these weapons are fired across the battlefield to keep the enemy’s heads down and allow other soldiers to advance toward their objective. Filling the air with flying lead may not kill the enemy, but victory often comes to the side that can provide the best covering fire.
The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by [words], they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.
- Jeff Cooper, The Art of the Rifle -
John Moses Browning is probably the most influential person in the history of firearms technology (though some gun enthusiasts would probably debate me on this point). He filed over one hundred patents in the United States and other countries, and the designs he created over a century ago are the foundations of nearly every gun on shelves and hips, in safes and hands today. John was born in the Utah Territory in 1855, and his father owned a gun shop in the town of Ogden. He made his first firearm when he was just thirteen and filed his first patent ten years later for a single-shot rifle. The design caught the attention of Oliver Winchester, whose company licensed it from the young inventor. Winchester had already made “the gun that won the West,” the Model 1873, and Browning’s design contributed to later developments that culminated with the still-beloved Model 1894, the most popular lever gun in the world.
Like Samuel Colt, John Browning’s early work focused on refining existing designs. After the Civil War, manufacturing was shifting away from single-shot muzzle-loaded rifles toward lever-action guns, where a shooter pushed a metal lever surrounding the trigger downward to eject the spent cartridge and load a new round. These rifles could fire much more rapidly than their muzzle-loaded relatives, and their designs allowed for greater recoil control and accuracy. Weapons like the Spencer carbine and Winchester Models 1873 and 1894 were instrumental in America’s westward growth and ending the violence that plagued the boomtowns of the Old West.
With the dawn of the new century, Browning Arms began work on other types of weapons. In 1905, John Browning released the Auto-5, the world’s first semiautomatic shotgun that ejected shells without needing to pump a slide or open the weapon. These guns, and variants made by other American and European companies over the next decade, were so effective that the Germans declared their use during the First World War to be “inhumane”—and executed any Allied soldier caught carrying one. Browning also spearheaded the design of automatic machine guns to replace Gatling’s hand-cranked models, and his M2 model was issued to every American infantry platoon during the Second World War. So was the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, used by soldiers for suppressing fire on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific, as well as in later American wars in Korea and Vietnam.
Browning’s best work, however, was with handguns (at least in my humble opinion). The M1911, also called the “Colt 1911” because Browning licensed the design or the “Colt 45” for its caliber, is the most revolutionary fireman ever made by the hand of man. Instead of Samuel Colt’s one-piece revolver with a rotating cylinder beneath the chamber, Browning designed a two-piece semiautomatic pistol with an upper slide and a lower receiver, and placed the magazine inside the grip. The slide moved backward when the gun was fired, and each shot ejected the spent cartridge and loaded the next round. The operator did not have to re-cock the hammer after each shot; the 1911 fired as quickly as its user could pull the trigger. Reloading was as simple as removing an empty magazine and slapping in a fresh one—no need to empty the cartridges one at a time as on a Colt “Peacemaker.” The 1911 saw use on every battlefield of the 20th century, and modern variants are still used by soldiers, police officers, and civilians today. Browning’s 1935 Hi Power handgun, designed nine years after the company’s founder had died, built in the 1911’s success with a larger magazine and better recoil absorption. It is the world’s most-copied handgun design and gave rise to weapons like the Beretta M9, the CZ-75, and the Jericho 941 (my personal carry gun of choice). John Browning’s legacy of making firearms safer, cheaper, and more deadly sets him above all the rest in the pantheon of gun designers.
You might be asking yourself, why are we talking about gun manufacturers? After all, firearms are very controversial in the United States, and foreigners are often confused or concerned about America’s perceived “obsession” when it comes to guns. I chose this topic for four reasons. First, I think it will be an interesting vehicle for next week’s discussion—and, again, please send us your questions and comments by this Friday. Second, Colt, Gatling, and Browning are interesting people not often discussed in what you might call “mainstream” historical circles. Third, the Covid-19 pandemic and other recent events have led to skyrocketing demand (and prices) as millions of Americans purchase firearms and ammunition, many for the first time, and I thought discussing the origins of America’s gun culture would help bring these newcomers into the fold.
Most importantly, I chose to bring up guns because they are relevant in our cultural conversations today. I will leave the political topics of gun control and the Second Amendment to our discussion next week, but as new owners enter the gun community, I want to use my platform to make an appeal. Owning a firearm of any kind comes with enormous responsibility, especially if you plan to carry it or if you have children in your home. First off, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. But if you own a gun, carry it for protection, and are not training with it regularly, you are a danger to yourself and those around you. If you find yourself in a situation where you must defend yourself or your family, you must know every part of your firearm and be physically and mentally prepared to use it. Otherwise, you may hurt yourself or someone else and will face lifelong physical, psychological, and legal consequences. If you have children of any age in your home and your firearms are not properly secured, shame on you. I am not going to tell you how to store your guns—that depends on individual circumstances—but as a firearm owner, you have a duty to keep your family safe, and that means protecting others (even from themselves) and teaching them to respect firearms as tools, not toys. Guns have no moral standing or political agenda, but they have one purpose: to kill and maim. Every single gun owner, no matter where they live or how many they have in their home, must treat them like what they are, must recognize the responsibility they carry by owning them, and must protect themselves and others from their improper use.
*Metropolitan Museum of Art