The Tommy Gun: The Most Famous Gun in America — and Nobody Knows Who Made It

Auto-Ordnance. The Tommy Gun. A trench broom that arrived a quarter century late. This is the complete history of Auto-Ordnance, the company behind the most famous gun in America, and the general whose name it carried but who never drew a line of its design. In nineteen sixteen, Army ordnance officer John Taliaferro Thompson set out to build a "trench broom" for the First World War. With financier Thomas Fortune Ryan's money, Navy commander John Blish's patent, and engineers Theodore Eickhoff and Oscar Payne doing the real work, he built the weapon he named the submachine gun. It arrived after the Armistice, too late for its war. Colt built the first fifteen thousand. Almost nobody bought them. The Post Office, the Marines, a few police departments, and then Prohibition, which turned it into the "Chicago Typewriter." By nineteen twenty-nine the company had sold barely ten thousand guns and was millions in debt, and the National Firearms Act of nineteen thirty-four taxed it nearly out of existence. Only the Second World War, with orders from Britain, France, and finally the United States, turned the Thompson into a legend, more than one and a half million built, after both Thompson and his son were already dead. What happened to Auto-Ordnance? Why did the Thompson submachine gun fail for twenty years? Who actually invented the Tommy Gun? Who owns Auto-Ordnance now? This is the rise, the ruin, and the late redemption of the gun that got its war too late. He built it to sweep a trench. By the time the world wanted it, that war was already over. Arms of the Republic tells the stories of the people, the factories, and the money behind America's guns. New documentaries regularly. No sponsorships, no brand deals, just the history. SOURCES: • William J. Helmer, The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar • Tracie L. Hill, Thompson: The American Legend • National Firearms Act of 1934 — ATF legislative history • U.S. v. Frank Williams et al. (Marcellus Thompson), District of New Jersey, 1921–1923 • Forgotten Weapons (Ian McCollum) — Thompson technical histories • American Rifleman / NRA — Auto-Ordnance and the G.I. Thompson #TommyGun #ThompsonSubmachineGun #AutoOrdnance #AmericanHistory #GunHistory #FirearmsHistory #JohnThompson #Prohibition #WWII #ColtFirearms #SavageArms #MilitaryHistory #DocumentaryHistory #BlishLock #ArmsOfTheRepublic