11/8/2023 0 Comments Steam engine inventor killed![]() ![]() Army turned it down on the ground that it fired so fast that supplying enough ammunition at the front would be impossible. Maxim had perfected his weapon three years earlier and had been trying to sell it ever since. To Maxim’s chagrin, the intrigues of Basil Zaharoff, the Nordenfeldt representative, earned the AngloSwedish competitor the sale after all. ![]() Where securing lucrative defense contracts is concerned, of course, clear superiority is rarely the only consideration. It was superior to every weapon of his time. The aircooled Uzi and Ingram submachine guns familiar to viewers of “Miami Vice” fire twelve hundred rounds per minute, almost twice as fast as Maxim’s first design, yet the principles of his prototype have remained the basis for the estimated one hundred million automatics built since. Water circulating in the casing around the barrel cooled it continuously but added little weight to the gun and tripod’s sixty pounds. ![]() Since one cartridge had to fire before the next would advance, even a delayed explosion would not jam the mechanism. To change belts, the gunner had only to thread the end of a new one into a slot. By contrast, a belt of ammunition delivered shells smoothly to Maxim’s gun for as long as the single operator held down the trigger. They also overheated so soon that the gunner periodically had to wait for his weapon to cool. And they jammed easily, sometimes because a gunner cranked too fast (a common reaction to a rush by the enemy), or because the cartridges did not fall uniformly into place, or because damp or old cartridges would hang fire, exploding just as the crank opened the breech. Their relatively meager rates of fire didn’t offset their extreme weights or the number of men required to operate them. Rival weapons like the American Gatling (1862), the French mitrailleuse (1867), and the AngloSwedish Nordenfeldt (1877) were crank-driven, their ammunition gravity-fed from a magazine set atop the rotating barrels. Maxim’s device, which utilized the recoil of one cartridge’s detonation to load and fire the next, was the first true machine gun. The stunt delighted the emperor and astonished his officers. ![]() 45-caliber rounds had barely slammed into the backdrop before Maxim stood up to bow toward the sovereign. In thirty seconds 330 bullets stitched the emperor’s initials, FJ, on the target a hundred yards distant. Dressed formally in top hat and morning coat, the American, Hiram Stevens Maxim, settled himself on a small seat on the rear leg of a curious tripod and grasped the handles of a black metal box from which protruded a single stubby, water-jacketed barrel. The day’s last entrant was a huge, bearded American-the inventor, salesman, and demonstrator of a small British firm’s only product: a squat, rather ugly gun. Franz Joseph seemed particularly impressed by the performance of the Nordenfeldt model, a gleaming five-barreled rifle demonstrated by a team of two-one man feeding the cartridges, the second carefully cranking out 180 shots per minute. In the spring of 1887, the emperor himself came out to the Steinfeld firing range a few kilometers from Vienna to watch the Austrian Army trials for rapid-firing weapons. ![]()
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