Eugene Morrison Stoner
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Creator Of Rifle Dies At 74
Eugene M. Stoner, who developed America's classic assault rifle, the M-16, while tinkering at night in his garage, died on Thursday at his home in Palm City, Fla. He was 74.
The cause of death was cancer, a spokesman for the family said.
While he had no formal engineering education, Mr. Stoner was widely regarded as one of the world's foremost designers of and experts on small arms. His M-16 has been standard issue for the United States armed forces since 1963, and he designed a wide range of weapons of various types and caliber as well.
He held some 100 patents on his inventions, and was a co-founder of Ares Inc., a weapons research and development company based in Port Clinton, Ohio. He was the company's chairman until he sold his interest 10 years ago and moved to Florida. There he continued working on small-arms design and development at the Knight Manufacturing Company, completing a longer-range, .50-caliber semiautomatic rifle within the last few months.
His role in the development of the M-16 was similar to that of Mikhail Kalashnikov in designing the Soviet counterpart, the AK-47. Mr. Kalashnikov also had no training when he pieced together gun parts to build a first version.
The two inventors of the world's leading small, rapid-fire assault weapons, met at conferences, became friends and compared notes.
But Mr. Stoner said that while the AK-47 was less complicated and tended to break down less often, the M-16 was lighter and fired more accurately. Mr. Kalashnikov said of his initial work on the weapon in 1947, ''When I was lying wounded during the war, I heard the other soldiers complaining about how the German weapons were better than ours,'' he said. ''So I was determined to invent something for the ordinary soldier -- a weapon that would be simple, tough and better than any other in the world.''
Their life styles were not comparable. Mr. Stoner's inventions made him a millionaire. He was also a pilot with his own plane. Mr. Kalashnikov, a tiny white-haired man three years Mr. Stoner's senior lived on a state pension in a small apartment east of Moscow. ''Stoner has his own aircraft.'' he once said, ''I can't even afford my own plane ticket.''
Colleagues of Mr. Stoner said he began his work in the early 1950's because military studies showed that soldiers in World War II and Korea, under the pressure of combat, were not pulling the trigger on the weapons. So Mr. Stoner tried to develop a rifle that would fire repeatedly with a single pull of the trigger.
Eugene Morrison Stoner was born in Gasport, Ind., on Nov. 22, 1922, the only child of Lloyd and Britannia Morrison Stoner. He moved to Long Beach, Calif., where he graduated from a technical high school. After the Depression there was not enough money in the family for him to attend college, and he went to work in 1939 for Vega Aircraft, which later became part of the Lockheed Corporation. He served in the Marine Corps in World War II in the South Pacific and northern China. After the war, he was employed by the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation.
Hearing about his work, Army experts sought out Mr. Stoner in the mid-1950's to help develop automatic rifles using smaller, faster bullets. Later, in the early 1960's he invented what came to be known as the Stoner 63, an automatic weapon using interchangeable parts that could be converted from a light rifle into a rapid-firing gun to conserve ammunition.
Mr. Stoner is survived by his wife, Barbara Hitt Stoner, whom he married in 1965; his first wife, Jean Stoner Mahony of Newport Beach, Calif., from whom he was divorced in 1962; four children from his first marriage, Patricia Magee of Alpine, Wyo., Susan Kleinpell of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Deirdre Elmore of Tiburon, Calif., and Michael, of Minneapolis, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren."
Designer Of M-16,Eugene M.Stoner,74