Who Truly Invented the First Machine Gun?

“I by no means shall overlook the way in which, That Blood upon this terrible day, Preserved us all from demise. He stood upon slightly mound, Solid his torpid eyes round, And mentioned beneath his breath : “No matter occurs we’ve acquired, The Maxim Gun, they usually haven’t.”

This passage, from Hillaire Belloc’s 1898 poem The Trendy Traveller, infamously captures the superior destruction wrought by certainly one of trendy warfare’s key improvements: the machine gun. Placing the firepower of dozens of troopers into the palms of only one, this weapon allowed the western colonial powers to beat half the recognized world, floor the First World Conflict right into a bloody stalemate, helped the Nazis blitzkrieg their approach throughout Europe, and stays an important a part of each military’s arsenal to today. But regardless of its outsized impression on fight, the fashionable machine gun is lower than a century and a half outdated. Why did it take so lengthy for this weapon to be developed, and who was answerable for the very important breakthrough? Properly, lock and cargo as we delve into the fascinating historical past of the machine gun.

Computerized hearth has lengthy been part of warfare, with volleys of arrows fired by lots of archers taking part in a key position in battles from antiquity to the late center ages. Putting such firepower within the palms of a single soldier, nevertheless, was one other matter totally. Within the late fifteenth Century, Italian renaissance man extraordinaire Leonardo da Vinci sketched quite a lot of ingenious engines of struggle in his notebooks, together with an arrow-firing “machine gun” comprising no fewer than sixteen crossbows mounted on a rotating wheel. One model of this system was pushed by a man-powered treadmill, which routinely cocked the bowstrings because it rotated. One more sketch depicts a spring-powered catapult with a number of arms for throwing stones in speedy succession. In Leonardo’s day, cannons have been simply beginning to seem on the battlefield, however they have been gradual and tedious to reload; so, naturally, Leonardo additionally designed artillery items that includes a number of barrels to extend their firepower. As with most of Leonardo’s innovations, nevertheless, there isn’t any proof that any of those weapons have been ever truly constructed.

The weapon generally cited as being the world’s first “true” machine gun is the Puckle Gun, patented in 1718 by London lawyer James Puckle. Nonetheless, strictly talking this isn’t fairly correct, since a machine gun is usually outlined as a weapon which might hearth a number of pictures in fast succession by turning a crank or – by the fashionable definition – pulling the set off. Slightly, Puckle’s gun is extra precisely described as a rapid-firing revolver cannon, extra akin to a contemporary revolver. That mentioned, it was amongst the primary, if not the primary gun, to ever be known as a machine gun when, in a 1722 transport manifest, it was famous that the ship had on board “2 Machine Weapons of Puckles.”

Curiously trendy trying in its design, the Puckle Gun boasted a 3 foot lengthy barrel and was designed to take a seat atop a tripod. It might additionally swivel and be aimed in any route extraordinarily quickly with little effort by the operator on account of how nicely balanced it was.

As soon as the prototype was accomplished in 1717, Puckle approached the British Navy who, on the time, have been having a whole lot of hassle with Ottoman pirates. You see, the massive, broadside cannons their ships have been outfitted with have been a poor weapon of alternative to make use of towards tiny, fast paced vessels that would fairly actually run circles across the greater craft.

Puckle felt his gun was good for this use-case. Ships might fairly simply have a number of of the Puckle weapons mounted throughout the perimeter of the deck and hearth at approaching pirates with unbelievable pace for the age.

Intrigued, officers from the English Board of Ordnance have been despatched to watch an illustration of the gun in 1717 in Woolwich. Sadly for Puckle, whereas they have been reportedly impressed with the pace at which it might launch projectiles of demise, and the way rapidly it may very well be reloaded, they determined to move.

Their objections to it have been primarily that it featured an unreliable flintlock system and it was too advanced to be simply manufactured, together with requiring many customized made parts that gunsmiths at that time didn’t have, all mixed making it tough to mass produce. On high of that, it didn’t precisely lend itself to quite a lot of tactical conditions on account of its measurement.

Unperturbed on the preliminary rejection, Puckle continued to refine the design, patenting a greater model of the gun a 12 months later in 1718. Mentioned patent, No. 418, describes the gun as being primarily for defensive functions and notes that it’s very best for defending “bridges, breaches, strains and passes, ships, boats, homes and different locations” from pesky foreigners.

A pure salesman, Puckle went so far as placing promoting of kinds proper in his patent, with the second line of mentioned patent studying: “Defending KING GEORGE your COUNTRY and LAWES – Is Defending YOUR SELVES and PROTESTANT CAUSE”

That is an thought Puckle would double down on by together with engravings on the gun itself that includes issues like King George, imagery of Britain and random bible verses.

To doubly promote potential buyers on the worth of the gun as a stalwart defender of Christian ideology, Puckle’s patent additionally describes how the gun might, in a pinch, hearth sq. bullets.

What does this need to do with faith?

Puckle thought that sq. bullets would trigger considerably extra harm to the human physique and believed that in the event that they have been shot at Muslim Turks (who the British have been combating on the time), it will, to cite the patent, “persuade [them] of the advantages of Christian civilisation”.

The gun might additionally hearth common, spherical projectiles too (which Puckle earmarked as being to be used towards Christians solely). On high of that, it additionally fired “grenados”, shot, basically comprising of many tiny bullets- you already know, for while you actually wished to smash somebody’s day.

Puckle started promoting shares of his firm to the general public in 1720 for about 8 kilos a bit (about £1,100 kilos or $1,600 as we speak) to finance building of extra superior Puckle Weapons, certainly one of which was demonstrated to the general public on March 31, 1722.

Throughout mentioned demonstration, as described within the London Journal: “[O]ne man discharged it 63 instances in seven Minutes, although all whereas Raining, and it throws off both one giant or sixteen Musquet Balls at each discharge with nice drive…”

Regardless of the spectacular and dependable show, the British navy on the entire was nonetheless uninterested within the newfangled expertise.

That mentioned, there was not less than one order, positioned by then Grasp-Common of Ordnance for Britain, Duke John Montagu, for 2 of the weapons to convey alongside in an try and seize St. Vincent and St. Lucia within the Caribbean. Whether or not these ever ended up getting used or not isn’t clear.

Summing up Puckles’ failed invention and firm, one sarcastic reporter for the London Journal quipped that the gun had “solely wounded [those] who’ve shares therein.” Burn.

In any occasion, it will be one other century and a half earlier than the primary true rapid-fire weapon appeared on the battlefield: the French mitrailleuse. Invented in 1851 by Belgian Military Captain Toussaint Fafschamps, the mitrailleuse comprised a cluster of fifty rifled barrels mounted on a standard wheeled artillery carriage. The ammunition, consisting of a lead bullet and paper cartridge fired by a spring-loaded needle, was held in a detachable breech block which was inserted into the rear of the weapon. The operator then turned a crank on the facet of the breech, which fired every barrel in fast succession. Whereas Fafschamp’s design was adopted by the Belgian Military, it was quickly improved by engineers Louis Christophe and Joseph Montigny, who in 1859 introduced their 37-barrel model to French Emperor Napoleon III. Impressed, Napoleon ordered the quick growth of an improved model below the best of secrecy, paying for the entire challenge out of his private funds. This resulted within the French Military formally adopting a 25-barrel mitrailleuse designed by Jean-Baptiste de Reffye in 1865

Whereas as we speak machine weapons are primarily used like rapid-firing rifles for laying down suppressive hearth or partaking quick-moving targets, the operational doctrine for the mitrailleuse was considerably completely different. For a lot of historical past, artillery was outfitted to fireplace not solely single stable cannonballs or explosive shells, but in addition giant numbers of smaller projectiles known as grapeshot or canister shot to be used towards infantry at shut vary – successfully turning them into big shotguns. In French, any such ammunition is named mitraille – therefore the identify mitrailleuse. Nonetheless, in 1858 the French Military adopted a Beaulieu 4-pounder rifled subject gun, which whereas significantly extra correct and long-ranged than earlier artillery, was not well-suited to firing anti-personnel rounds. Consequently, as Reffye identified:

“In fight are discovered many circumstances the place infantry, discovering itself inside vary of artillery, the latter can’t resist the speedy hearth of the rifle and, if the infantry, not letting itself be intimidated by the detonations of the items and the bursting of the shells, marched resolutely in direction of batteries themselves undefended by infantry, it will quickly scale back them to silence by eliminating their crews…For the reason that struggle of secession in America, one has sought to construct a weapon which might imitate the rapidity of fireplace of the rifle, whereas surpassing it in vary, reliably putting infantry and cavalry at distances the place canister loses its effectiveness. The bullet-canon has thus been developed to enter motion between 900 and 2500 metres, with extra accuracy than the outdated grape-shot which appears nearly to have fallen into disuse these days.”

Thus, the mitrailleuse was conceived not as a rapid-firing rifle, however as a longer-ranged model of canister shot, with the weapons being deployed alongside common artillery batteries. The mitrailleuse first noticed fight in the course of the Franco-Prussian struggle of 1870-1871, however regardless of the Napoleon’s excessive hopes for his Military’s high-tech “secret weapon”, it proved a disappointment. Nonetheless, this had extra to do with French doctrine than the design of the weapon itself, for on these uncommon situations when it was used at shut vary, it proved devastatingly efficient. As one observer famous on the September 1, 1870 Battle of Sedan:

“On the heights, near Floeing, there was positioned a battery of Mitrailleuses. There may be, reverse to that, a spherical hill with wooden on the highest; and out of this wooden and from behind this hill got here the Prussian columns. As they got here out they have been swept down by these Mitrailleuses, and they didn’t succeed. They may not make any progress, however have been obliged to return once more, and go spherical on the reverse slope of the hill, checked by the Mitrailleuse.”

However regardless of the mitrailleuse being the primary rapid-fire weapon to see fight in giant numbers – certainly, in trendy French the time period mitrailleuse means “machine gun” – it’s extra correctly categorized as a volley gun than a correct machine gun because the ammunition is loaded manually quite than routinely. A lot nearer to the fashionable definition was the Gatling gun, patented by American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861. Not like the mitrailleuse, whose barrels have been fastened, the Gatling gun’s ten barrels rotated round a central shaft, pushed by a hand crank. As a barrel rotated into the highest place, a cartridge dropped from a gravity-fed hopper and was routinely loaded into the chamber. When the barrel reached the underside place, the cartridge was fired. The empty cartridge was then ejected from the chamber earlier than the barrel reached the highest place and the entire cycle started anew. Using a number of barrels allowed each to chill off between firings, stopping the weapon from overheating and permitting it to maintain steady hearth at a fee of as much as 200 rounds per minute.

Gatling’s inspiration for creating his gun was surprisingly humanitarian. As a doctor, Gatling knew that the overwhelming majority of casualties in struggle weren’t brought on by bullets or shells however illness. Thus, as he later wrote to a pal in 1877:

“It occurred to me that if I might invent a machine – a gun – which might by rapidity of fireplace, allow one man to do as a lot battle responsibility as 100, that it will, to a terrific extent, supersede the need of enormous armies, and consequently, publicity to battle and illness be significantly diminished.”

However like all weapons meant to be so highly effective they might finish struggle, the Gatling gun solely succeeded in rising its effectivity and bloodiness. Whereas the Union Military refused to undertake the weapon in the course of the Civil Conflict on the grounds of complexity and value, Gatling weapons did see use on the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, within the spring of 1865. Based mostly on its brutal effectiveness in that battle, the Military lastly adopted the Gatling gun the next 12 months. Different nations quickly adopted, together with the British Empire, Argentina, Peru, Siam, and Korea. However whereas the Gatling gun was initially meant to be used by and towards trendy, industrialized armies, it was most successfully employed towards poorly armed opponents in colonial wars. For instance, the British Empire used Gatling weapons to devastating impact towards the Zulu in South Africa and the Mahdists in Sudan, whereas again in the US the weapon was broadly deployed towards Native Individuals and putting staff.

A number of different hand-cranked machine weapons have been developed throughout this era together with the single-barrelled Agar or “espresso mill” gun, launched in 1861 and utilized in restricted numbers in the course of the Civil Conflict – primarily to protect bridges, slender passes, and different strategic targets. There was additionally the Gardner Gun and the multiple-barrelled Nordenfelt gun, each utilized in small numbers by the British Military and Royal Navy. However whereas such manually-operated firearms have been ultimately outdated by extra superior self-loading varieties, the Gatling gun mechanism lives on in trendy aircraft-mounted rotary-barrelled cannons just like the M61 Vulcan and the GAU-8 Avenger, that are pushed by electrical motors. And in 1963, Common Electrical miniaturized the mechanism to chamber the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, creating the well-known M134 Minigun immortalized in such movies as Predator and Terminator 2. Due to their electrical drives and the self-cooling properties of the multi-barrel design and the excessive pace, these weapons are capable of attain blistering charges of fireplace as much as 6,000 rounds per minute.

However whereas nearer to the fashionable definition of a machine gun, the Gatling, Agar, Gardner, Nordenfelt and their ilk nonetheless lacked one important characteristic: self-loading – the flexibility to make use of the leftover power from a fired cartridge to cycle the motion routinely. Whereas many inventors all through the nineteenth Century tried to develop such a weapon, they have been all stymied by the identical technical limitation: gunpowder. Just about unchanged since its invention in China within the ninth Century, black gunpowder created giant quantities of residue or fouling that rapidly clogged up the mechanisms of early would-be machine weapons, making sustained hearth inconceivable. In 1886, nevertheless, the French Military launched an innovation that might change the face of warfare: Poudre B or “smokeless powder”, which burned hotter, quicker, and cleaner than conventional gunpowder. And as luck would have it, simply two years earlier an American inventor had patented the right weapon to make use of this new powder.

Born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was a prolific inventor, his numerous creations together with a bronchitis inhaler, the primary automated hearth sprinkler system, an early model of the lightbulb, and an amusement park experience known as the “Captive Flying Machine” which continues to be used to today. He was additionally certainly one of many inventors competing with the Wright Brothers to construct the primary powered, heavier-than-air flying machine. However Maxim’s best declare to fame would come on account of an opportunity encounter in 1882. As he later recounted to the Occasions of London:

“I used to be in Vienna, the place I met an American whom I had recognized within the States. He mentioned: ‘Dangle your chemistry and electrical energy! If you wish to make a pile of cash, invent one thing that can allow these Europeans to chop one another’s throats with larger facility.’ ”

Over the subsequent 4 years, Maxim toiled in his London workshop to good such a weapon, which he inevitably dubbed the Maxim Gun. Not like its predecessors, the Maxim Gun was recoil-operated, utilizing the recoil impulse generated by every cartridge firing to push again the sliding barrel and cycle the weapon’s motion – no hand-cranking or different exterior energy supply required. The weapon was fed from a protracted fabric belt of ammunition whereas its barrel was wrapped in a steel jacket stuffed with cooling water, permitting it to maintain firing charges as excessive as 600 rounds per minute for lengthy durations of time. When first launched, the Maxim gun was designed to make use of then-standard black powder cartridges; nevertheless, it was quickly tailored for the newly-invented smokeless powder.

In 1886, with funding from the Vickers engineering agency, Maxim based the Maxim Gun Firm to provide and promote his invention. Although it was extra dependable and will ship larger firepower than some other weapon available on the market, the actual genius of Maxim’s design lay in its adaptability; by swapping out only a handful of elements, the weapon may very well be made to shoot nearly any cartridge. This made the gun an instantaneous worldwide bestseller, with over 30 nations ordering Maxim weapons in dozens of various calibers. Just like the Gatling gun earlier than it, the Maxim quickly grew to become carefully related to colonial conquest – particularly in the course of the late nineteenth Century “Scramble for Africa.” For instance, in the course of the 1893-1894 Matabele Conflict in what’s now Zimbabwe, British Maxim weapons succeeded in holding off a drive of 5,000 Ndebele warriors – killing some 1,600. Certainly, the battle was so lopsided that some surviving warriors dedicated suicide by throwing themselves onto their spears.

Like Richard Gatling 20 years earlier than, many believed that the Maxim Gun would make struggle between civilized nations unthinkable, bringing a couple of new period of peace. Because the New York Occasions argued in 1897:

“These are the devices which have revolutionized the strategies of warfare, and due to their devastating results have made nations and riles give larger thought to the end result of struggle earlier than coming into…They’re peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors.”

However they have been to be confirmed tragically unsuitable simply 17 years later with the outbreak of the First World Conflict – a battle synonymous with the Maxim gun and industrialized slaughter. Although much more troops have been killed by artillery than machine weapons, the latter had an outsized psychological impression, reducing down scores of males like corn beneath the scythe and turning no-man’s-land between the trenches into impassable demise traps. However the bloody stalemate the Maxim gun helped protect additionally drove innovation in machine gun design. Whereas dependable and lethal, the common Maxim gun was heavy, awkward to maneuver round, and required a staff of not less than 4 males to function effectively. Regaining the kind of cellular warfare which had dominated the early months of the struggle required lighter, handier weapons that may very well be carried and operated by fewer males and deployed on the transfer. This requirement led to the event of a brand new technology of sunshine machine weapons just like the British Lewis Gun, the French Chauchat, and the American Browning Computerized Rifle, which – together with improved techniques involving the coordinated use of artillery, plane, and tanks – ultimately helped break the stalemate and produce in regards to the Armistice of 1918. The machine gun’s place in trendy warfare was secured.

Whereas the Maxim Gun has largely been outdated by extra trendy designs, the OG machine gun continues to see service to this very day, with many examples lately displaying up within the battle in Ukraine. However what did Sir Hiram Maxim consider his most well-known creation’s lethal legacy? Whereas outwardly happy by his success, Maxim not less than appeared conscious of the disturbing hypocrisy of the world round him. Shortly earlier than the outbreak of the First World Conflict, Maxim – a lifelong bronchitis sufferer – invented a brand new sort of medical inhaler which distributed soothing pine vapour. The invention drew scorn from his fellow inventors, who accused him of “prostituting his abilities” on quack science. To this accusation, Maxim responded:

“That is certainly a really curious world. I used to be the primary man on the planet to make an automated gun. It’s astonishing to notice how rapidly this invention put me on the very pinnacle of fame. Has it been anything however a killing machine, little or no would have been mentioned of it. From the foregoing it is going to be seen that it’s a very credible factor to invent a killing machine, and nothing lower than a shame to invent an equipment to stop human struggling.”

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