It reads like an ordinary patent. A citizen of the United States, living in Weber County, Utah, has invented “certain new and useful improvements in firearms.” No fanfare. No grand claims. Just a statement of fact. Yet those lines would lead to a sidearm that rode in the holsters of American troops from the muddy trenches of World War I to the jungles of Vietnam, and into the hands of special operations units long after it was officially replaced. On February 14, 1911, U.S. Patent No. 984,519 was issued to a quiet Ogden man: John Moses Browning. The document itself...