John Moses Browning was probably the greatest firearms designer and inventor in history. Browning’s 125 patents have endured the test of time, and many are still in use and/or production to this day. For example, his 1922 design known as the Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun is still currently in use with multiple militaries around the world, including that of the United States—103 years after its initial manufacture.
It is his last patent, #1,618,510, applied for in 1923, but not awarded until Feb. 22, 1927, (barely three months after his death) that we examine here. It was for a semi-automatic pistol design, the Grand Rendement or Grande Puissance. That translates to “high power,” which is how we get the name of that classic gun still in manufacture around the globe to this day.
The Browning-designed Colt M1911 in .45 ACP had come about when the U.S. Army Ordnance Department wanted a semi-automatic handgun that would chamber and fire the .45 ACP cartridge. In that case, the cartridge dictated the design of the gun. In the case of the Hi Power, it was the magazine that drove the design elements.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the French military had been looking for a semi-auto pistol that could hold 15 rounds of ammunition for its new service sidearm. A double-stack 9 mm magazine was the logical conclusion and, in the months following the end of the First World War, an arms designer at Fabrique Nationale (FN), Dieudonné Saive, set about designing the magazine before the pistol had even been contemplated.
He presented the magazine design to Browning with the list of objectives put forth by the French Ordnance Board, and Browning produced two prototype pistols around it, each with a different barrel-locking mechanism. To put it simply, one design had a fixed, blowback design, and the other had a short-recoil, tilting-barrel assembly. The second of the two was chosen, and Browning set about making the necessary designs and drawings for the gun to be submitted for French adoption.
It was during the last of his 60 trans-Atlantic visits to his office at FN in Herstal, Belgium, when he died at his desk on Nov. 26, 1926. Saive picked up where Browning left off and made his own improvements to the GP design, resulting in the Hi Power that was ready for manufacture and sale by 1934. The French, on the other hand, had profited from the field trials of the Browning/Saive pistol to the extent that they took most of the best and viable aspects of the Belgian handgun design and incorporated them into their own MAS Model 1935 in lieu of adopting the Hi Power.
Stung by the apparent duplicity of the French, FN received its first military contract for the Hi Power from the Belgian Army in 1935. One thousand pistols were ordered to start, and that was soon followed by an order for 5,000 more Hi Powers from the Chinese National Army. The very first Hi Powers were made with tangent sights graded out to 1,000 meters and cut with a slot to accept a wooden shoulder stock, like those made for the Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” pistol.
The 1,000-meter sights were quickly determined to be relatively useless, and production models soon scaled back the tangent sights to 500 meters. Orders soon rolled in: Lithuania, Finland, Estonia, Sweden, Peru and even France—some 70,000 FN Hi Powers were manufactured and shipped before the German blitzkrieg rolled into Belgium in May of 1940.
It took the Nazis just 18 days to subdue Belgium, and on May 20, the FN plant at Herstal was seized. By June, the Germans began to force factory employees to continue the production of the Hi Power under the new German code of “Pistole 640(b).” Pre-war employees numbered around 4,000, but that grew to 12,000 with the addition of non-Belgian slave labor by the Germans.
September of 1944 saw the liberation of Herstal and the hasty evacuation of the German war machine. It was determined that in 1940, some 8,500 Hi Powers had been produced, with the number rising to 65,000 in 1941, 80,000 in 1942 and peak production of the 640(b) at 101,000 in 1943. A total of 319,000 had been manufactured by the time the war ended.
Fortunately for the Allied war effort, the story of the Hi Power didn’t end with the Germans seizing the Herstal factory. Saive and a few of the ranking officials at FN managed to escape and found a home in Great Britain as exiles. The manufacturing drawings for the Hi Power escaped as well, but ended up in Vichy France and eventually Switzerland, where they were sequestered for the duration of the war.
Saive reverse-engineered the Hi Power from a few pre-war examples found in England and produced the drawings from memory. The FN directors in exile were able to secure a contract with the Chinese National Army for 200,000 Hi Powers and desperately tried to get a factory to make them. Enter the John Inglis Co. of Toronto, Ontario.
Founded in 1859, Inglis had made mostly steam boilers. Beginning in the late 1930s, it began to produce the British Bren gun. After some months of legal wrangling over intellectual property rights, the Chinese contract was finally green lit, and Inglis began to make the Hi Power in the spring of 1944. At first, they were made with the same tangent rear sights and shoulder stock slot, but when the Chinese contract was cancelled after 50,000 or so had been made, the revised gun had a fixed rear sight and no stock slot. By September of 1945 when the war ended, more than 150,000 had been produced and entered British and Imperial service, seeing limited use during the actual war.
After the war, well that’s a story for another time. Let’s end here by saying that a pistol, desired by the French, made by the Belgians and Canadians, saw service on both sides of the War in Europe, and continues to serve in 2025—as of this writing, 10,000 Canadian Hi Powers are in transit to aid the Ukrainians in their struggle against the invading Russians.
