Eugene Stoner

Eugene Morrison Stoner (born November 22, 1922 in Gosport , Indiana , † April 24, 1997 in Palm City , Florida ) was an American engineer and entrepreneur. It is mostly associated with the AR-15 rifle , which was introduced by the US military as the M16 .

Life

Stoner went to Long Beach high school and then worked for the Vega Aircraft Company. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the South Pacific and northern China.

From 1954 he worked at ArmaLite, a sister company of the “Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corporation” as chief engineer. While at ArmaLite , he designed the AR-3, AR-7 and AR-16 rifles. In 1955 he finished the development of the AR-10 , which took part in tenders by the US Army. The US Army rejected his design and instead introduced the M14 rifle, known as the "T44" in the prototype stage .

Stoner's assistant, Robert Fremont and the illustrator L. James Sullivan were responsible for deriving the AR-15 from the AR-10 by downsizing so that it could fire the 5.56 × 45 mm NATO cartridge . Stoner left Armalite in 1961 to work as a consultant with Colt . Finally he worked for Cadillac Gage, where he designed the “Stoner 62 weapon system”, a modular weapon system, which could be set up as a “standard automatic rifle”, as a light, medium and electromagnetically operated fixed machine gun .

Since Armalite had sold Stoner's patent for the direct action of the gases on the breech to Colt, the Stoner weapon systems used a piston-actuated breech system , although Stoner himself believed that direct gas propulsion was the ideal method for firearms. Once again, Robert Fremont and L. James Sullivan changed the Stoner design and changed it to the 5.56 × 45 mm cartridge, thus getting the Stoner 63 weapon system .

In 1971 he co-founded the "Ares Incorporated of Port Clinton, Ohio" but left the company in 1989 after developing the "Ares Light Machine Gun" - also known as the Stoner 86 - which was an advanced version of the Stoner 63 weapon system.

From 1990 he worked for Knight's Armament Company (KAC) to develop the Stoner Gewehr-25 ( SR-25 ), which is in service with the US military as the "Mk 11 Mod 0". While at KAC, he worked on another version of the Stoner weapon system known as the Stoner 96 . One of his latest developments is the SR-50 sniper rifle.

Eugene Stoner was married twice: first to Jean Stoner, with whom he had four children. He divorced her in 1962 and married Barbara Hitt in 1965, with whom he remained married until his death. He was also a private pilot and owned his own aircraft. Eugene Stoner died of cancer on April 24, 1997 at his Palm City, Florida home.

source

This article is based on the article Eugene Stoner from the free encyclopedia WaffenWiki and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License . A list of the authors is available in the WaffenWiki .

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