POTD: Ed Browning 30-06 Prototype – The Other Browning Brother

Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a rifle from the Browning nobody talks about. Jonathan Edmund “Ed” Browning was John Moses Browning’s half brother and spent roughly fifty years as the model maker at the family shop in Ogden. Everybody knows JMB. Nobody knows the man who built his models. When John dropped dead at the FN factory in November of 1926, Ed was still at the bench, and inside of a year he started in on this rifle.

It is a short recoil semi-auto in 30-06. The barrel and barrel extension slide back a short distance when you fire, and that movement kicks the bolt rearward. Feeding is from a fixed internal magazine that looks like it holds five, and the gun weighs a hair over nine pounds. Ed had a working example in hand when he walked into Colt in early 1929, where the patent department pushed three of his self-loading designs through.

Now look at the calendar. Ordnance had just called for self-loaders for the July 1929 trials at Aberdeen, where the Garand, the Pedersen, a Thompson, a ZH-29 and a Colt-built Browning all turned up. I do not believe for a second that Ed’s timing was an accident.

He kept refining it until the day he died in 1939, then the rights went to Winchester. Ed never got a rifle adopted and never got his name on anything the public remembers, all while working in the shadow of arguably the best gun designer who ever lived. Rough hand to be dealt.

Most of our POTDs utilize images from our friends at Rock Island Auction Company, the premier firearms auction in the United States. Take some time to browse their current auctions – who knows, maybe you’ll find a piece of history to take home!

“Jonathan Ed Browning Prototype .30-06 Semi-Automatic Rifle.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/4097/1266/jonathan-ed-browning-prototype-3006-semiautomatic-rifle. Accessed 31 Aug. 2026.

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