robbers and murderers.  He has been known to spend many evenings in the rooms of lonesome students who “need a friend.”

    “Tommy Arkle” is one of the Middle West’s finest contributions to
    the modern ideal of human service.

    (2)

    TWO NEW MACHINE GUNS ARE INVENTED FOR THE U.S.  ARMY BY THE “EDISON
    OF FIREARMS”

    BY HARRY B. HUNT

    HARTFORD, CONN., NOV. 12.—­“Well, Old J.M. has done it again.”

    That is the chief topic of conversation these days in the big shops
    of Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, where the bulk of the rifles,
    pistols and machine guns for Uncle Sam’s army is being turned out.

    For in these towns to say that “Old J.M. has done it again” is the
    simplest and most direct way of stating that John M. Browning has
    invented a new kind of firearm.

This time, however, “Old J.M.” has done it twice.  He has invented not one, but two new guns.  Both have been accepted by the United States government, contracts for 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.