John Moses Browning

Raised by Mormon parents, he made his first gun from scrap iron at age 13. He founded the Browning Brothers Company, which was responsible for several innovations in firearms, including the breech-loading single-shot rifle (1879) and the Browning automatic pistol (1911). The company's history is entwined with that of World War I: the pistol used to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and thus begin the War was a Browning, and the Browning machine gun (1917) and the Browning automatic rifle (1918) figured prominently in the War.