History of the AR-10
For the most part, the entire AR-10 was an original design. The AR-10’s prototype was created by ArmaLite and designed by Eugene Stoner in 1955. Between the gas system and its straight-line barrel and stock design, the AR-10 was much easier, compared to others of its time, to manage automatic or burst fire while maintaining accuracy. The straight-line recoil design allows the operator to have additional control during because it limits muzzle rise.
AR-10 Gas System
By Le-boulanger - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63250642
Additionally, this gun was much lighter than other comparable rifles. Because ArmaLite was owned and operated by the aerospace company Fairchild, they used much lighter materials—including forged aluminum receivers—in the design of the AR-10. While these materials were common in aerospace engineering, they were not as common in small arms manufacturing.
And yet, despite these innovations in both manufacturing process and design, less than 10,000 ArmaLite AR-10 rifles were ever assembled. Only a handful of countries purchased various iterations of AR-10 from ArmaLite—Guatemala, Burma, Italy, Cuba, Sudan, and Portugal—for certain sections of the military.
But while the AR-10 never gained much traction itself, its design influenced the more popular and well-known AR-15. Military officials commissioned Armalite to create the replacement for the M1 Garand. So, in 1957, ArmaLite developed a smaller version of the AR-10, giving birth to the AR-15 platform. Though the AR-15 gained popularity among the world’s militaries, civilians, and sportsmen, none of the AR-10 variants gained the same momentum. The AR-10 might live in the shadow of the AR-15—the most popular modern sporting rifle to date— but it still can lay claim to being its predecessor.
Sources
https://www.armalite.com/Armalite/History
https://www.armalite.com/Armalite/About-Us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArmaLite_AR-10
