A few automatic weapons patented in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s were called organ or machine guns, consisting of multi-barreled weapons loaded on carts. These bear little resemblance to today's machine gun, which fires a continuous stream of projectiles as long as the trigger is depressed. One of these earlier models was invented by John W. Cochrane in 1834--apparently to no great success. Richard Jordan Gatling, an American inventor and the pioneer of machine guns, invented the hand-cranked, six-barreled Gatling gun in 1862. Rotating around an axis and firing.58-caliber brass cartridges, the gun, which fed ammunition from a top-mounted hopper, made its military debut at Butler's siege of Petersburg, Virginia, during the Civil War; the ten-barrel model, firing a thousand rounds per minute and covering a range of 2,400 yards, was a deciding factor in the 1898 outcome of the battle of Santiago, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War, as well as in subsequent colonial wars in Africa and Asia. The Gatling gun was rendered obsolete by the automatic reciprocating machine gun invented by Hiram Maxim, which operated off the energy from the erupting shell. Belt-fed and water-cooled by an attached water container, this heavier, sturdier variety of machine gun dominated the military establishment in every major country. Its familiar cartridge belt came to symbolize the fighting warrior in action.
In 1872 New York arms manufacturer Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss invented a five-barrel machine gun mounted on a solid breech block. At thirty-three rounds per minute, the Hotchkiss gun was an improvement on the Gatling gun but fired at an uneven rate and was not nearly so efficient as Hiram Maxim's gun, which could fire 666 rounds per minute. Maxim's was the first successful automatic weapon, and it presaged the coming mechanization of war, which blunted the effects of frontal infantry assault.
In 1892, Ogden, Utah, designer John Moses Browning (1855-1926) produced the Browning automatic rifle (or BAR), adopted by the United States Army in 1918 as the first machine gun working off the gas produced in firing. This multipurpose.30 or.50-caliber gun weighed only twenty pounds (9.08 kg) and could be set up with its own two-legged barrel support or fired from the shoulder. Browning followed the BAR with a short-recoil gun in 1901. Its gas-operated principle is still widely used in light automatic rifles and assault weapons.
American Army colonel and inventor Isaac Newton Lewis (1858-1931) improved on Browning's design in 1911 with the first lightweight automatic machine gun, which was efficient both in the aircraft and ground attacks of World War I, producing ninety-two percent of all injuries. Gas-driven and air-cooled, the thirty-six-pound (16.3 kg) Lewis gun fired rounds from a top-mounted revolving magazine, which held forty-seven cartridges. The American government, however, showed little enthusiasm for these breakthroughs. Consequently, Maxim, Hotchkiss, and Lewis looked to Europe as a market for their inventions, which became standard issue in the armies of England, France, and Germany. By World War I, the United States Coast Guard and Navy, too, had adopted Lewis's gun.
In the spring of 1915, machine guns transformed airplanes from observation crafts to a new type of weapon: a French World War I aviator, Roland Garros (1888-1918), acquired a trigger-to-cam linkage invented by French designer Raymond Saulnier (1881-1964) that allowed him to fire a machine gun through the propeller of his Morane plane. He terrorized German lines in April by firing on them from above. After Garros was forced to crash-land behind enemy lines in May, the Germans examined the gun mount, discovered its secret, and applied it to their new Parabellum, an air-cooled machine gun.
The German military hired American aircraft designer Anthony Herman Gerard Fokker to adapt Garros's device; instead, Fokker invented a new synchronizing firing mechanism similar to Franz Schneider's interrupter gear, which was invented in 1913. Fokker solved the problem of keeping bullets from destroying the propeller by letting the blade itself fire the gun. By attaching a lever to the cam, Fokker brought control of the device into the pilot's hand. Other adaptations included mounting machine guns on the front of pusher planes--those with propellers in the rear--and placing rear gunners in a position to fire from the tail of the fuselage. Side, wing, and swivel mounts presented additional problems of aim. The eventual synchronization of gun and plane was labeled the greatest single innovation in the evolution of aerial warfare.
Other aspects of warfare demanded heavier machine guns. German commanders equipped aircraft with 20-mm Becker guns, which were more effective against trucks and locomotive s. The British chose the 20-mm Oerlikon machine gun to arm ships and airplanes. Browning machine guns continued to play a part in World War II and the Korean War. The United States relied on the.50-caliber Browning gun or the.37-mm cannon. During the Vietnam and Persian Gulf conflicts, American helicopters were armed with 20-mm machine guns.
An array of submachine guns—short shoulder weapons fed by box or drum magazines--was devised by the military for special purposes, such as use in border patrols and in firing from vehicles. The Thompson or " Tommy" model, designed by American Army Colonel John Taliaferro Thompson (1860-1940), relied on the delayed blowback principle. It could fire eight-hundred.45-caliber rounds per minute and was first used in combat by United States Marines in Nicaragua in 1925. It soon became the weapon of choice of American gangsters and the Irish Republican Army.
Inventors in many nations contributed to the evolution of the popular machine gun. Russian ordnance relied on an adaptation of the Maxim gun, while Germany developed its own MG-34 and MG-42 lightweight guns and the Erma MP 40, a simplified barrel and breech mechanism that fired five-hundred rounds per minute and could be mass-produced. In the 1950s, Russian inventors Degtyarev and Gorunov produced a series of machine guns, including the KPV, an unusual recoil-operated variety. Also, England's durable lightweight, the Bren 7.62-mm, which fed off an arc-shaped magazine, earned a reputation for dependability and cool firing.
Many of the machine gun models in use in the late 1990s are based on designs more than fifty years old, such as the Bren gun mentioned above, and the American M2, which is based on a Browning design from the 1930s. The most sophisticated and powerful modern machine gun, the Vulcan, relies on an even older source. Its design is based on one of the very earliest machine guns, the Gatling, with rotating barrels. While the Gatling was manually cranked, the Vulcan uses an outside power source, either electric or hydraulic. This gun can fire 6,000 shots per minute, and was very successful as an anti-tank and anti-aircraft gun in the Persian Gulf War.
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