The browning hi-power today:

The browning hi-power today: dominant high-capacity pistol no longer, the hi-power offers other virtues

In November of 1926, John Moses Browning dropped dead while working in his office at Fabrique Nationale headquarters in Herstal, Belgium. The project in front of him when he collapsed was the finalization of his Superposed shotgun, but if you ask most students of firearms what his last design was, they will most likely reply, "The Hi-Power pistol!"
Well, not exactly. Browning was certainly responsible for the Hi-Power's little known predecessor, the Grand Rendement (loosely translated, "High Capacity") pistol, developed for the French military and tested by them in 1922. When one looks at Browning's last patent, which bears U.S. Patent Office Number 1,618,510, and was filed on June 28, 1923--it's clear that the pistol depleted is the Grand Rendement, complete with such fen lures as a breech bolt running through the slide from the rear, which never made it to the pistol we know today as the Hi-Power.
The 16 shot Grand Rendement 9mm Parabellum was a large gun with an ungainly appearance and overly long grip-frame. The man who brought the pistol down to a manageable size was Dieudonne Saive. Two years away from becoming head of all small arms production for FN, Salve was the company's most gifted gun designer in the absence of Browning, and was up to the task.
Making Of A Masterpiece
He shortened the pistol at the front and at the butt, streamlining the gun and reducing weight. He brought the magazine down to 13 rounds in a reasonably compact size, mad did away with the breech bolt design in favor a system that would allow a similar takedown to John Browning's already-proven 1911 .45. The older 9mm's manual safety, an awkward thing at the grip tang area, was replaced with one that worked similar to that of the Colt pistol.

It would not be too simplistic to say that John Moses certainly did create the concept, but Monsieur Salve was the one who most assuredly shaped it into what became its classic form. Pretty much finalized by 1930, the Grand Puissance ("High Power", known to Europeans later as the "GP" for short) was not formally introduced until 1935, creating its other famous synonym, P-35.
The gun was delayed by sluggish market conditions caused by the world-wide depression. Once announced, however, it was an instant hit. The GP was available with plain fixed sights or a tangent adjustable which, with wild optimism for a 9mm pistol, was graded for sighting distances up to 500 meters. It was also offered with wooden shoulder stock, a popular accessory among the military handgun purchasers of Europe.
Serial number 36,000 had been produced, says gun historian R. Blake Stevens, before Salve redesigned the barrel lug's cam slot to cure a spate of breakages that had occurred with early models after heavy shooting. (1)
Into The Crucible
Then came Hitler's invasion of the Low Countries. Belgium was quickly conquered, and the FN factory annexed to the Third Reich's cause. Salve and some of his colleagues managed to flee to free countries. Salve was instrumental in founding a production line at the John Inglis Company in Canada, where the Hi-Power would be produced throughout World War II for Canada, England, China, and other Allied nations.
Meanwhile, some 319,000 Belgian Hi-Powers were manufactured by the Nazis during their occupation. By the time the Allies liberated Herstal, the German occupying forces had had to resort to forced labor, and the guns they were producing were the worst Brownings of all time, with ugly finishes and often poor fit.

Time marched on. In the second half of the 20th Century, the Browning Hi-Power became the overwhelming choice of service pistol for most of the NATO nations and virtually all of the British Commonwealth countries. It was said that the Hi-Power was the only firearm in common use on both Allied and Axis sides in World War II. Nor would this be the last time men with Brownings would face other men with Brownings in battle. The P-35 was the standard sidearm of both sides in the Falklands intervention, and many were used by both Israeli and Arab forces in the Middle East.
Copies would be licensed by FN from factories in Canada and Argentina. Unlicensed copies would emerge from Hungary. Israel, and even Indonesia. (An agreement was in place for England to build them at Enfield during the war years, but the project never got off the ground.) Hi-Powers assembled in Portugal began earning a reputation for superior functionality in the 1980s. Stevens estimates that FN alone had produced 1.5 million of these pistols by the mid 1990s.
The P-35 has been produced in other calibers, notably .30 Luger and, in the 1990s, .40 S&W. Various double action models have been offered to the market, one designed by Monsieur Saive himself in 1952. The most mechanically intriguing of these options was the FA, or Fast Action design, which survives today as the SFS (Super Fast Safety) retrofit offered for both Hi-Powers and 191 Is by Bill Laughridge's Cylinder & Slide Shop (800-448-1713; www.cylinder-slide.com). A lightweight aluminum alloy frame, also designed by a then-aging Salve in the 1950s, was offered commercially but never caught on.