Spewing bullets from the machine gun

Ever since the cannon and musket became basic tools of warfare, inventors had

struggled to find ways to load and fire guns faster. Early attempts at meeting this

challenge included weapons with multiple barrels or multiple charges to be fired in

succession. The first practical design was the Gatling gun, named after American

inventor Richard Gatling. An opportunist inspired by the U.S. Civil War, he used

percussion lock technology and devised a hand-crank mechanism to feed charges into

his gun’s chambers, fire them, and then extract the spent cartridges. Gatling claimed

that this gun would fire 200 rounds a minute.

Although a Southerner, Gatling offered his invention to both sides in the war. Neither

bought it. Only after the war did it become part of the U.S. arsenal. Britain, Japan,

Russia, Turkey, and Spain all placed orders, too.

In the 1880s, another American inventor, Hiram Maxim, came up with an improved

machine gun that required no cranking. You could hold down the trigger, and the gun

would just keep firing, making this the first automatic weapon. It used the power of

each charge’s recoil to eject the cartridge and move the next one into the chamber. It

could spit more than 600 bullets a minute. By WWI, the Maxim and imitators were a

major part of just about any battle.

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