Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.

and so he did

this is the maxim machine gun

it was the first truly automatic firearm

it was adopted by everybody

fought against itself and won every time

when you hear descriptions of the horrors of wwi and the unprecedented devastating destruction caused by the new machine gun

this is the one theyre talking about

so how did this horrific instrument of awesomeness come about

well it all starts with a mouse

so in the second half of the 1800s a kid named hiram maxim was boppin around learning all sorts of trades

he was very smart and tinkered incessantly

as an apprentice in a mill he made a self resetting mousetrap

he used the energy from a thrashing mouse to reset the trap for the next guy

they call this foreshadowing

his family was real smart too

his father tinkered with gun designs and early aircraft

hirams son would go on to invent the silencer

and through his early adult life hiram himself invented a bunch of stuff

in fact he even invented the incandescent lightbulb

wait clammy but didnt

shh

it was a confusing time ok

and he got really tangled up with edison

you may have heard what a ruthless man edison was

well one big lesson hiram maxim learned from dealing with all that was

get your damn patents straight six ways from sunday

so maxim had become a pretty successful businessman from all of his inventions but he was getting burnt out on this eoectricity thing

he needed to move on to something else

and some of his business associates who may or may not have been edison lackeys were like hiram

bro

you know what you should really do

take this literal zillion dollars and go to europe to study their patents

uh for like research and stuff

just dont come back for like ten years ok

and dont invent anything

well getting paid a literal zillion dollars to kck back sounds pretty sweet

but maxim got bored

one day he was drinking with this jew friend of his who was like bro bro just invent a murdergun

and maxim thought back to his childhood

his dads prototype designs

his mousetrap

and eventually he realized that you can take the recoil energy of a gun going off and use that to cock the gun again

and this time hed patent the hell out of it

first he made a system that would cock a lever action rofle automatically

and patented it

and any possible way to use that

then he secretly started making prototypes in england

in around 1890 he really started to get somewhere

he had a system of cranks that brought rounds into the gun on a belt

and an elbow that would lock the bolt forward long enough for pressure to drop as the barrel jerked back and threw the bolt rearward

straight is strong then bent it moves back

and it did this with a friggin black powder round

the smoke and fouling was hardcore lol

luckily smokeless powder came out soon after which made the gun even more effective

one prototype had no trigger

just a throttle for how many boolits you want to throw per minute lol

dial it anywhere from 1 a min to like 6000

the first real one just had a push button on the back

at first everybody was interested by not sure what to do with it

literally everybody bought one

and i mean one

no big sales everybody just wanted to try one out but nobody adopted any

they got sent to colonies like in africa

and the men there greatly appreciated the crazy firepower

especially when outnumbered 200 to 1 by natives

but back home nobody cared about their experiences

which was pretty much a bummer because everybody had a few machineguns when wwi started

and it turns out oh shit these are fucking dangerous lol

so everybody got one

germany had the mg08

russia used the maxim gun

britain used the vickers

but these are all basically identical except for caliber

and can be readily swapped to your caliber if you capture some from the enemy

fuck yeah

they were really really successful

lets talk about why

ok so whats that giant barrel thing

well its a water jacket

maxim calculated and found 1lb of water can hold as much heat as 5lb of metal

so he literally just surrounded the barrel in water

the barrel cannot get above 212 degrees fahrenheit

and the steam cycles back into a tank so you can reuse it

you can shoot literally millions of rounds through it

now all this makes the thing kinda heavy

40lbs just for the gun and more than double with a tripod

but man it worked well once emplaced

the only problem is maneuver warfare as used in wwii ended up making it obsolete

so we dont use it anymore

we just do air cooled and multiple barrels

another weird thing is the literal clock spring it uses

this can be dialed up or down so it works with whatever shitty ammunition came out of the factory last week

this is important because ammunition quality was horrible

but i hear the russians used theirs until shockingly recently on the chinese border

because if a million chinese come across in a human wave

you need something proven to go five million rounds without a problem lol

pew pew

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