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Movie Theater Carbine Williams,

Sean the Nailer

Sergeant
Full Member
Minuteman
  • May 20, 2006
    6,895
    10,675
    Winnipeg, Mb.
    Yeah, I'm bringing this up again. Mostly because the original thread is gone. James Stewart is the star of this one, but the story is actually based on historical fact.

    That fact being, he's a bootlegger who gets caught and sent to prison. While in there, he GETS PERMISSION and ability to build a rifle. It is tested (in prison) and adopted by the U.S. Gov't ergo issued to soldiers. Upon release from prison, he is hired on by one of the U.S.A.'s largest and best firearms manufacturers.

    If this weren't a true story, it would be good in itself. They don't make'em like they used to.

    Anyone else seen this? Who remembers this?
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

    The guy this movie was based on was most definitely a different kinda Cat! If I remember correctly he was just an ole' backwoods, moonshiner who ended-up doing time in the pen, I believe it was for killing a deputy sheriff. I don't think he had hardly any schooling, but while he was still in prison(or right after he got out??), he designed a reliable, handily little carbine that eventually went on to be adopted by the U.S. Army as the .30cal M1-Carbine just in time to be manufactured, and issued out to thousands of our G.I.'s & Marines on their way to the European & Pacific Theaters.

    I've got an old, "American Rifleman" issue with an article written about Carbine Williams & the M1-Carbine. If that's not a textbook definition of the much-celebrated, "Only-in-America" story, then I don't know what the Hell is! lol

    I'd love to find the "Carbine Williams" film on DVD. I've never been able to see it.
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

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    Available for less than 5$ on UTube
    http://www.youtube.com/movie?v=AJQNgw0yodY&ob=av1n&feature=mv_sr

    David Marshal Williams was born in Cumberland County, North Carolina eldest of seven children. As a young boy, he worked on his family's farm. He dropped out of school after eighth grade and began work in a blacksmith shop, enjoyed a short stint in Navy, but was discharged because he was underage. After returning from the Navy, he spent a semester at Blackstone Military Academy before being expelled.

    In 1918, he married Margaret Cooke and they later had one child, David Marshall, Jr. Williams worked for Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, but on the side he had an illegal distillery near Godwin, North Carolina. During a raid on this still on July 22, 1921, a deputy sheriff Alfred Jackson Pate was shot and killed, and Williams was charged with first degree murder. The trial ended in a hung jury, but Williams decided to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second degree murder. He was given a 20-30 year sentence.

    While serving time at the Caledonia State Prison Farm in Halifax County, North Carolina the superintendent, H.T. Peoples, noted his mechanical aptitude and allowed him access to the prison's machine shop where he demonstrated a genius for fashioning replacement parts for the guards' firearms from pieces of scrap automobile parts. In prison, he would save paper and pencils and stay up late at night drawing plans for various firearms. His extraordinary skills in the machine shop permitted him to stay ahead of his assignments and allowed him time for his own hobby. He began building lathes and other tools, and then parts for guns. His mother sent him technical data on guns and also provided him with contacts with patent attorneys. While in prison, he invented the short-stroke piston and the floating chamber principles that eventually revolutionized small-arms manufacture.

    The family started a campaign to commute his sentence and they were joined by the sheriff to whom he had surrendered and the widow of the man he was accused of killing. Governor McLean reduced the sentence and in 1929 Williams went on parole and in 1931 he was released from prison.

    Back in Cumberland County, he set to work perfecting his inventions. After two years, he went to Washington, DC to show his work to the War Department. He got his first contract to modify the .30 caliber Brownings to fire .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.

    It was the use of his short-stroke piston in the M1 Carbine manufactured by Winchester and others, that brought his greatest fame and his nickname "Carbine Williams." General Douglas MacArthur called his light rapid-fire carbine "one of the strongest contributing factors in our victory in the Pacific."

    Some have said that Williams' short-stroke piston was the work of others but his U.S. Patent 2,090,656 Sheet 5, (filed 1931), clearly shows gas being tapped off ahead of a chamber to a piston below.

    He spent his last years in Godwin after some time in Connecticut. He died at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1975.

    His floating chamber was used in one of the most popular American .22 semi-automatic rifles, the Remington 550-A. Later, in 1954, the Winchester Model 50 Automatic shotgun was launched. This, too, featured the Williams Chamber, making it the first semi-automatic shotgun with a non-recoiling barrel. Also, the U.S. patents for the highly successful Benelli Shotgun (U.S. Patent 4,604,942 ) clearly reference Williams' U.S. Patent 2,476,232 .

    In 1952, a film of his life was made by MGM starring Jimmy Stewart and Jean Hagen as his wife Maggie; Williams himself served as technical advisor.
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

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    Re: Carbine Williams,

    That's truly amazing. I mean not only was he intelligent & talented enough to create & design things like gas operating mechanisms for something as complicated as a semi-auto firearm, & build his own lathe with minimal if any formal machinist training, but he did so while in prison doing hard time.

    I just flipped the TV past MSNBC, & one of those documentary-type, prison shows is on. As I watch these useless thugs & gangbangers talk shit to their guards, i find myself SERIOUSLY doubting if there's even 1 inmate in that entire prison with enough "get-up & go" about him to whip his own ass, much less put forth the kinda effort it'd take to teach themselves to master a skill as complex as what ole' Carbine Williams was mastering.

    It always amazes me to think back decades & decades before computers, CAD programs, & CNC-machines, about the level of talent, skill, creativity, & absolute freakin' genius that master gunsmiths & machinists the likes of a Carbine Williams, or a John Moses Browning must have possessed to be allow them the ability to visualize each & every part, operation, & machining process required to get some brand-new, state-of-the-art, idea for a firearm from their inside their own head, to hand-drawn blueprints, & machine operations that would finally cut, grind, & mill a block of steel into a precision machined, hand-fitted, blued-steel masterpiece like Browning's 1911.

    That's a kind of engineering genius that's been lost forever. I'm afraid all our computers & technology have dumbed us down so much that if it were all gone tomorrow, it'd take us 100yrs or more to figure out how to design & machine by hand, what J.M. Browning's generation had already mastered during the Industrial Revolution.
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

    Loved that movie. It comes on occasionally on TMC or one of those.

    When I lived in NC, I went to the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. His shop is preserved there. The 'room' is one of the displays.

    Great story about a great man, played by a great actor!**

    Cheers,

    Sirhr

    ** Few remember that Jimmy Stewart, despite his fame and acting career before WW2, enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1940 as a Private -- and earned his wings and commission. He flew 20 "official" missions over Germany but supposedly flew a lot more that were uncounted. He topped out at Brigadier General in 1959, serving with reserves. Maybe some of today's poncey little hollywood stars should take a lesson...
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

    Not to be a party pooper, but, ...

    "1. Williams did not invent the short stroke piston. He did, however, develop the version that was used on Ed Browning's gun.
    2. The short stroke piston had already been patented, but the Patent office overlooked it and Winchester hid this fact due to their investment in the Williams patent and Williams himself.
    3. There is no evidence one way or another that the piston was designed "While Williams was in prison". In fact, the first time it is demonstrated on a firearm is over 8 years after his release from prision.
    4. The Williams patent shows nothing near the eventual incarnation that went into the modified Browning firearm.
    5. Williams himself went out of his way to distance himself from the project that led to the M1 Carbine following his work on the "M2" rifle.
    6. Lary Ruth is contradicted by Bruce Canfield, arguably THE expert on the subject. See referenced article in American Rifleman.
    7. Pugsley skirts the issue, but seems to solidly confirm the one thing all agree on, the Piston was Williams DEVELOPMENT if not his original idea. Basically, he developed and engineered it whether or not he knew of the prior patent.
    8. Hatcher, like Puglsey, seems to solidly confirm the same facts. Both seem to go out of their way NOT to say that Williams invented, designed, or developed the M1 Carbine specifically. Heck, John Garand and Ed Browning owe more to the design than Williams."

    Source
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

    Screenwriters left that stuff out? Hard to believe. Still makes a great movie. "When fact differs from fiction, print the fiction." - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

    I got acopy of that movie, looks like a pirated version, but it works well. Always loved this one, great movie. Perhaps Hollywood should 'remake' this one and give it a little more detail, it would be better than the rest of the shit they are cranking out. Oh wait- it would be pro-gun.
    My Bad.
    Seriously though, awesome movie for what it was.
     
    Re: Carbine Williams,

    I live very close to where he lived. One of my older neighbors who is into guns knew him well. He was definitely a different dude. Mechanically gifted and from what my neighbor had to say not a lot of formal education.