1855-1926

American inventor who designed and produced a wide variety of firearms. The son of a gunsmith, he produced his first gun from scrap metal when he was thirteen. In the late 1890s he developed an automatic machine-gun that used propelling gas as the driving force to drive the piston, extract the cartridge case, reload, and refire the ammunition. In 1917 the United States Army purchased nearly 57,000 of these guns for use in World War I.