History of the M1 Carbine

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History of the M1 Carbine

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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.