Machine Guns

Lizbeth Cerna Joshua Piñera

What's a machine gun?• A machine gun is a fully automatic mounted or portable firearm, usually designed to fire bullets in quick succession from an ammunition belt or magazine, typically at a rate of several hundred rounds per minute.

Machine Gun Invention• It would not be until the mid-19th century

that successful machine-gun designs came into existence. The key characteristic of modern machine guns, their relatively high rate of fire and more importantly machine (automatic) loading, came with the Model 1862 Gatling gun, which was adopted by the United States Navy. These weapons were still powered by hand.

First Machine Gun• The Gatling gun, patented in 1861 by Richard

Jordan Gatling, was the first to offer controlled, sequential fire with automatic loading. The Gatlings were the first widely used rapid-fire guns and, due to their multiple barrels

• However, this changed with Hiram Maxim's idea of harnessing recoil energy to power reloading in his Maxim machine gun.

Maxim Machine Gun• The Maxim gun was the first recoil-

operated machine gun, invented by the American-born British inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim in 1884. It has been called "the weapon most associated with [British] imperial conquest“

• The Maxim gun was first used by Britain's colonial forces in the 1893–1894

• The Maxim gun was adopted by almost all European military forces by 1906.

Machine Guns used in WW1

• By World War I, many armies had moved on to improved machine guns. The British Vickers machine gun was an improved and redesigned Maxim

• The German Army's Maschinengewehr 08 and the Russian Pulemyot Maxim were both more or less direct copies of the Maxim introduced into the British Army.

• Still the Maxim was the most feared and used in WW1.

Conclusion• We can conclude that the machine guns

have always played a very important roll in war since their invention, because they have a high firepower and rate.

• Also we have learned that in WW1 machine guns were one of the most important guns used in war.