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Great Gun inventor?
gunone4
Member Posts: 39 ✭✭
Really enjoyed joining this community of gun lovers.My question is, Who do you all think is the great gun inventor of all time?My choice is John Browning With over 80 firearms to his credit most still used today.I would like some of your thaughts.
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Resident Wittgensteinian
The NRA is on our side!
The gene pool needs chlorine.
Under great contabutions:
Greener (Hammerless)
Richard Gatling (Gatling gun)
Maxim (Portable machinegun)
I Refuse to be a VictimGrumpy old man
Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of All Those that Threaten it
without his invention we woud be speaking german....
But what the heck ! We ended being a fasist country anyhow.......
Call it The Home security sindrome...
JD
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What other dungeon is so dark as ones own heart, what jailer so inexorable as ones own mind.
You can't miss fast enough.
The gene pool needs chlorine.
How Can You Compete With This?
Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov
More Than 70,000,000 AK47's Have Been Produced Worldwide Since 1949.
Used by more than 50 Armies World Wide.
Remember...Terrorist are attacking Civilians; Not the Government. Protect Yourself!
Keep your Powder dry and your Musket well oiled.
NRA Lifetime Benefactor Member.
for somebody to actually mention stoner is obscene, how many men died holding his jammed up inferior weapon? stoner should have been shot as a traitor, maybe they tried with a m-16, and it jammed!!!!-Ralph
It was never supposed to be like this.
rugerniner, you can't compete with klashnakov, hands down #1
for somebody to actually mention stoner is obscene, how many men died holding his jammed up inferior weapon? stoner should have been shot as a traitor, maybe they tried with a m-16, and it jammed!!!!-Ralph
It was never supposed to be like this.
whoa down there reb. stoner made a very good weapon untill the politios
got ahold of it and change things to make it cheaper
Macnamara (spl) change the requirment to chrome the barrel and chamber to cut cost and shiped the weapons with no cleaning equipment
or armorers that were trained in the weapon upkeep
HE should have been charged with murder for every one lost for his bad decisions
But instead everone blamed the weapon.
Lt. snarlgard RRG
SMILE...MAKE EM WONDER WHAT YOUR UP TO
It was never supposed to be like this.
*In 1909 Henry Ford created the Model T and it got around 30mpg..today's Ford's may be safer and more luxurious but in 100 years we've not really gotten further on a gallon of gasoline have we?*
Trigger system: design taken from Brownings patent for the 1900 SL shotgun.
Gas system: design from William' adaptation of Browning's system for using barrel gases to propel a piston unlocking a turning breech block.
someone explain exactly what Kalishnikov did NOT steal from Browning? sure, his refinements were cheaper to produce, but by using this as a judging criteria, why are we not all driving a Yugo?
Remember...Terrorist are attacking Civilians; Not the Government. Protect Yourself!
Keep your Powder dry and your Musket well oiled.
NRA Lifetime Benefactor Member.
Have to give the Devil his due, Browning was the most prolific gun mechanic/designer in the short history of self contained cartridges. While on the subject of giving due, Bill Ruger was a innovative developer and marketer, he used existing designs modified to be saleable to the average shooter, until he came along, most of the marketing in firearms was directed at hunters and target shooters. Bill Ruger changed all this, his guns were manufactured to be sold to plinkers and others who just enjoy shooting informally, he taught every other gun company in the world a lesson,you will sell a lot more average guns at average prices to average people when you gear your product to the market. Yep He was a genius, a genius that made and sold a good product at a good price, ain't many of those around.
I think Browning deserves a big nod, and I have to say that inventors often get their best "ahas" by improving on other peoples' ideas. The brilliance of Kalashnikov was the attitude he took toward what a gun should be. Of course, seeing him on TV now, he borders on having a bit too much ego about it, but with 50 million or so of his specific model in the world I guess he has a right to a certain amount of smugness.
Stoner gets too much heat. His early prototypes were somewhat different from what the military ordered him to build for them. They have to take a share of the blame, and I think that gets Stoner off the hook. Given what he was looking at in the military of his day, the gun(s) he designed were innovative. The military simply sidelined his "futuristic" gun and kept "developing" it their way, while in the meantime fielding the M1A. Kalashnikov had the luxury of rising to a level of influence and prestige as a sort of whiz kid that gave him more freedom to design his way. Even so, his first design was never built (in favor of the SKS), and his early AKs had problems due to welding inadequacy. And the forged receivers were too heavy by over 2 pounds. It wasn't until welding technology caught up with the AK that the guns became as good as we know them now in the post forged-receiver era, despite the fact that a forged receiver Soviet boat anchor will cost you more on the collector's market.
Nobody likes the M1 Carbine well enough to pick Carbine Williams, and fewer know enough of the history to pick Colt or Wesson, I suppose. And Winchester wasn't really a gun designer at all, was he? He was a CEO type. Though they make good guns. Of course, whoever made German's first Sturm-Gewehr should get a mention for innovation, but I don't know who that was.
Or we could just pick the whole Jennings family, for making a series of guns that any American can afford to jam.
JIM FRICK
His claim to fame was that he drew off a lot of gas from the huge AK gas port to power a heavy bolt carrier against a powerful operating spring. The combination could overpower rust, mud, dust, ice and dirty and deformed ammunition to fire reliably. The heavily reinforced magazine lips resisted deformation in combat conditions.
These areas are exactly the weaknesses of the AR15/16
How about Pederson whom Browning called a genius. He designed some great guns for Remington-and then there's his Pederson device for the '03 Springfield ; a secret weapon. To appreciate his work you have to handle and shoot his guns, take them apart and look at the parts and the novel way he solved mechanical problems.
Stoners AR 15-16 gas system, blowing gas directly into the action is a fundamental design defect for a combat weapon. I rank his work with that of Hugo Borchardt/Georg Luger. Both designs are flawed in reliability for combat conditions. At least in the case of the Luger, the U.S. Army rejected it for good and proper reasons. The alleged fixes to the AR didnt address the fundamental problems.
It was heart breaking to read accounts of the many GIs who were bayonetted while trying to clear AR16 jams.
Spagin who designed the PPsh41, a stamped cheapo that was accurate and very effective in WW2 and Korea.
Bill Ruger has had a 50 year run with ever improving guns. He didnt sit on ancient designs like Colt and S&W but kept innovating. That's why Colt and S&W are sucking wind while Ruger is healthy.
Look at the trigger/safety assembly of a Remington model 8 (Browning design) and see if it looks like Mr.Kalishnikov may have borrowed. Garand borrowed from Browning too,the first semi-auto rifle design that is known to have worked was Brownings adaptation of a lever action Winchester, He used gases from the barrel to activate the lever, it was a tool room expieriment but worked and led to further development of gas bleed/recoil systems.
An argument can be made that the Mauser designs impacted gun history the most, world wide.
2. First matchlock
3. First flintlock predecessor
4. The man who invented percussion ignition. (I think the name was
something like Forcyth)
5. First self-contained cartridge (Volcannic, BB Cap?)
6. Only then the people you have been nameing.
http://huntingsociety.org/HistBrowning.html
October 7, 1879 U.S. Patent No. 220,271 was granted for the single shot rifle.
February 16, 1886 Patent No. 336,287 was granted on a lever action repeating shotgun. Known as the Winchester Model 1887, it was the first successful repeating shotgun.
November 7, 1892 Filed first patents on the Colt Model 1895 Automatic Machine Gun.
September 14, 1895 Filed patent application on first semi-automatic pistol.
February 8, 1900 The first of four patents were filed on the revolutionary autoloading shotgun. It would be manufactured by Fabrique Nationale in 1903 and by Remington Arms Company in 1905.
July 10, 1902 Patent application was filed on a pump action shotgun that would become the Stevens Model 520.
http://www.theunionstation.org/browning.htm
many of his inventions were manufactured and sold under names such as Winchester, Remington, and Colt.
Seems to me that Browning had a rather large influence on alot of the companies that we are familiar with. No?
The gene pool needs chlorine.
2. Samuel Colt, not only for his inventions. His talent for marketing was unequalled at the time. He also, through his factory, advanced the sciences of metallurgy and modern business practices.
At a time (1850s and 1860s) when most workers were considered expendable and unworthy of basic decency by employers, Sam Colt built housing, schools and recreational facilities for his workers near his factory.
He was a great advancer in sociology and labor rights too. If you worked at the Colt factory in the 1850s or 1860s, you made a very good wage, in comparatively safe conditions, compared to other factory workers of the day.
3. Joshua Shaw, who reportedly invented the percussion cap in the early 1800s. By the 1830s it was widely distributed as an ignition system. Without the percussion cap, the modern primer and cased ammunition would not be possible. Someone would have invented the percussion cap eventually, as is true with nearly all inventions, but Shaw is believed to be the first.
4. The J. Stevens Arms & Tool company workers who, in 1887, invented the cartridge we call the .22 Long Rifle. This is the world's most popular cartridge. It's used by every major military force in the world, usually for training, but sometimes for more nefarious purposes (assassination comes to mind).
The modern .22 Long Rifle cartridge generates more energy, compared to its size, than any other cartridge extant.
5. The inventor(s) of black powder. It is believed that an ancient Chinese recipe for a longevity potion is the basis for gunpowder. However, there is also evidence that black powder was invented in the Middle East, probably Arabia. Who knows? Without this compound, we'd all be talking about bows, slings, whether to use a large or medium stone against intruders or how long an arrow was needed to kill game.
I'd have to give the nod to the above inventors, instead of choosing just one.
"A hit with a .22 is better than a miss with a .44!"
The other thing I was thinking is, it would be funny if the truth was that the very things that make the AK great -- it's basic looseness -- were really just poor manufacturing features that happened to work well.
I still say Gaston Glock deserves a mention, as does the German, whoever he was, that developed the carbine that appeared at the end of WWII, was it the M44? -- anyway, the early German "assault rifle," and its mid-power cartridge, on which Kalashnikov claims his AK was definitely NOT based!
Mauser brothers.
Colt.
Bill Ruger was a great industrialist and marketer but is nowhere near the likes of the others mentioned above. If the question was "Who did the most for firearms ownership in the US?" Then I am sure his name would be at or near the top and justifyibly so. However the man was not a great inventer like the others named above.
moc.murofsmraerifeht