Browning is unquestionably the foremost inventor of firearms in the world. He was born of Mormon parents, in Ogden, Utah, in 1854, and his father had a gun shop. As a boy Browning became familiar with the use of firearms and when he was but fourteen years of age he invented an improved breech mechanism which was later used in the Winchester repeater. Curiously enough, it was a Browning pistol that was used by the assassin at Serajevo who killed the Archduke of Austria and precipitated the great European war, and it was with the Browning machine-gun and rifle that our boys swept the Germans back through the Argonne Forest and helped to bring the war to a successful end.
Although the machine-gun has been used ever since the Civil War, it was not a vital factor in warfare until the recent great conflict. Army officials were very slow to take it up, because they did not understand it. They used to think of it as an inferior piece of light artillery, instead of a superior rifle. The Gatling was so heavy that it had to be mounted on wheels, and naturally it was thought of as a cannon. In the Franco-Prussian War the French had a machine-gun by which they set great store. It was called a _mitrailleuse_, or a gun for firing grape-shot. It was something like the Gatling. The French counted on this machine to surprise and overwhelm the Germans. But they made the mistake of considering it a piece of artillery and fired it from long range, so that it did not have a chance to show its worth. Only on one or two occasions was it used at close range, and then it did frightful execution. However, it was a very unsatisfactory machine, and kept getting out of order. It earned the contempt of the Germans, and later when the Maxim gun was offered to the German Army they would have none of it. They did not want to bother with "a toy cannon."
It really was not until the war between Russia and Japan that military men began to realize the value of the machine-gun. As the war went on, both the Russians and the Japanese bought up all the machine-guns they could secure. They learned what could be done with the aid of barbed wire to retard the enemy while the machine-guns mowed them down as they were trying to get through.