Many of America's most cherished firearms were designed by John M. Browning, including various Winchester lever pistols, Colt pistols including the 1911, and the Auto-5, the first successful semi-automatic shotgun. Around 1920, he began planning a shotgun that would be unavailable to a high-quality, economical shotgun, which would be his final invention and contribution to the firearms industry.
The shotgun was still famous, but the shotgun had never taken off in the United States. Browning loved the single seeing plane of the shotgun and was confident that Americans would appreciate it as well, as the country was known as "a nation of riflemen." In Europe, where firearms were individually crafted and pricey, was popular.
Browning was a brilliant designer as well as a successful businessman. He realized that in order for this shotgun to be a successful, it needed to have the highest quality possible in order to be mass-produced in large quantities. His target price was around $150, which was far less than the cost of handcrafted European firearms but still a significant sum at a period when many traditional American guns were available for less than $50.
Then, Browning began work on his Superposed shotgun in the early 1920s. He was familiar with a wide range of European designs and desired to enhance them. It took a long time, and he didn't finalize his design until 1926, when he applied for and received a patent.
In Belgium, Browning had a lengthy affiliation with FN Gun Manifacturer. It had agreed to construct the Superposed after producing many of his concepts. He moved to Liege with his son Val in late 1926 to work on the final aspects of his design, but he died before it could be constructed. Browning died of an heart attack in his FN Gun Manifacturer office on November 26, 1926.