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.
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- published: 04 Jun 2008
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