immense numbers of each have been
signed, and work of production is being pushed night and day. The
new weapons will be put into the field against Germany at the
earliest possible day.

Who is John Browning? You never heard of him?

Well, Browning is the father of rapid-fire and automatic firearms.
His is the brain behind practically every basic small firearm
invention in the past 40 years. He has been to the development of
firearms what Edison has been to electricity.

"Unquestionably the greatest inventor of firearms in the world," is
the unanimous verdict of the gun experts of the Colt, Remington and
Winchester plants, whose business it is to study and criticise every
development in firearms.

But if Browning is our greatest gun inventor, he is the most
"gun-shy" genius in the country when it comes to publicity. He
would rather face a machine gun than a reporter.

A few years ago a paper in his home state--Utah--published a little
story about his success as an inventor, and the story was copied by
the Hartford Courant.

"I'd rather have paid $1,000 cash than have had that stuff printed,"
Browning says.

Friends, however, who believe that the world should know something
about this firearms wizard, furnish the following sidelights on his
career:

Browning comes from an old-stock Mormon family of Ogden, Utah. As a
young man he was a great hunter, going off into the woods for a
month or six weeks at a time, with only his gun for company. He was
only 24 when he worked out his ideas for a gun carrying a magazine
full of cartridges, which could be fired rapidly in succession. He
pounded out the parts for his first rapid-fire gun with hammer and
cold chisel.

Since that time, pump and "trombone" shotguns, automatic pistols,
rapid-fire rifles produced by the biggest firearms manufacturers in
the country have been Browning's products.

The United States army pistol is a Browning invention.

A Browning pistol manufactured by the Fabrique Nationale of Belgium
was made the standard equipment for the armies of Belgium, Russia,
Spain, Italy and Serbia.

On completion of the one-millionth pistol by the Fabrique Nationale,
King Albert of Belgium knighted the modest inventor, so he is now,
officially, "Sir" John Browning.

Browning is tall, slender, slight