According to a widespread legend,[2] in April 1897[9] FN sent their sales manager Hart O. Berg to Hartford, where he had previously worked, to investigate advances in bicycle design introduced by the Pope Manufacturing Company.

[7] There, he supposedly accidentally met John Browning[7] and persuaded him to have his pistol manufactured at FN by telling him the story of a modern factory with nothing to produce.

[10] Despite state-of-the-art manufacturing capabilities, by the end of 1895 FN was in poor financial shape due to a lack of orders on their M1889 rifles and a lost legal battle with Mauser over the rights to produce improved M1893s.

In 1896-1897 Berg, who was acquainted with Browning due to their joint work on the Colt machine gun in 1893-1894, persuaded him in correspondence to visit Liège with his pistol designs, which he did in April 1897.

Afterward, Berg and Browning traveled to Berlin and showed a locked-breech and a blowback pistol to Hugo Borchardt to obtain approval from DWM.

[2] Berg presented a draft of the license agreement to the FN board in June 1897[9] and then traveled to Hartford to finalize it with John and Matt Brownings in July 1897.

[14] Eugen Schauman, a Finnish nationalist activist, assassinated the Governor-General Nikolay Bobrikov (the highest Russian authority in the Grand Duchy of Finland) with a Browning pistol in Helsinki on June 16, 1904.

[15] An Jung-geun, a Korean-independence activist, assassinated the 1st Prime Minister of Japan and Resident-General of Korea Itō Hirobumi with this type of gun on October 26, 1909 in Harbin railway station.

[18] Abelardo Mendoza Leyva, a militant of the Peruvian left-wing APRA party, is also reported to have used an FN1900 to assassinate President Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro in Lima, on April 30, 1933.