A History of the M1 Garand

During World War I, the United States Army experimented with a number of different machine gun designs, and the news reports of the tests got a young inventor thinking about, and eventually designing, a machine gun of his own. His initial attempt was a primer-actuated light machine gun he submitted to the National Bureau of Standards, which had instructed him to make a model of it. That design became the basis for what would, eventually, become the M1 rifle—commonly called the “Garand” after its inventor, John Cantius Garand.