As early as the 18th century, some inventors in Britain and the United States invented automatic ** similar to machine guns, and obtained many patents, but until the end of the 19th century, none of the machine guns were able to be put into real combat.
Speaking of machine guns, one might think of the Maxim machine gun, which was the world's first fully automatic machine gun that was universally equipped with troops. The inventor of this machine gun, Maxim (1840-1916), was born in England but lived in the United States. When Maxim returned to England in 1882, he saw that the recoil of a soldier's rifle had bruised his shoulders when he fired, and he wondered if he could use the recoil of the gun to load the bullet.
Makqin took a Winchester rifle, carefully studied the process of unlocking, reshelling, and feeding the rifle when firing, and made a new automatic rifle in the second year, which can use the gas ejected when the gunpowder of the bullet case ** to complete a series of actions such as unlocking, unshelling, feeding, and re-locking the rifle, and realize the continuous shooting of bullets. This automatic rifle not only has a fast rate of fire, but also has a low recoil (the energy that would otherwise be wasted is used to feed ammunition) and high shooting accuracy. In 1884, on the basis of the automatic rifle, Maxim used a 6-meter-long canvas bag as a bullet chain to create the world's first Maxim machine gun that could fire automatically and continuously, and obtained a machine gun patent.
The theoretical rate of fire of the Maxim machine gun was 600 rounds per minute, which was much more intense than the rifle that fired less than 10 rounds a minute at the time. But in the first few years when it was invented, the first teams were not interested in it, because it had a complex structure and was easily damaged, the gun body was bulky and not easy to carry, and the high-speed shooting made the barrel hot and needed water to cool it, which was very inconvenient. Of course, the more important reason is that one of the principles of each team at that time was to save bullets, and experts believed that it only took one bullet to shoot an enemy, and it was a waste of bullets to shoot indiscriminately with a machine gun. Therefore, it was not until 1887 that the British tried to buy 3 Maxim machine guns. In the process, Maxim improved his machine gun on the one hand, and on the other hand, continued to sell this new type of murder to various countries**.
The Maxim machine gun became famous in 1893, when a colonial army of only 50 British troops and hundreds of locals defeated a Zulu army of 5,000 men with four planes in a battle between the Zulus in Africa and the Zulus, killing and wounding more than 3,000 people on the spot. A week later, the two sides fought again, and a small British army faced a Zulu army of 2,000 riflingmen and 4,000 warriors, killing 2,500 men on the Makqin machine. After that, the Maxim machine gun attracted the attention of the first teams in Europe.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the German Emperor Wilhelm II ** performed the Maxim machine gun and praised this gun, and then the German army was heavily equipped with the German version of the machine gun MG08. In the First World War, the Maxim machine gun (and its various versions of the replica) showed its skills, in the Battle of the Somme, when hundreds of thousands of British and French troops rushed to the German positions, they were strafed by hundreds of German machine guns, and on July 1, 1916 alone, nearly 60,000 people were killed, which shocked the world.
On the one hand, at that time, it was believed that the appearance of machine guns was an unprecedented catastrophe for mankind, because before that, mankind simply could not do so efficiently ** compatriots. Before the end of World War I, each regiment of the American Expeditionary Force going to Europe was equipped with more than 300 machine guns, while before World War I had only four in one regiment.
Aside from the hazards of machine guns, the design of the Maxim machine gun is very beautiful in terms of physics. Before it, a considerable part of the energy generated by the gunpowder in the bullet casing during shooting became the recoil during shooting, which was not only a waste of energy, but also affected the stability of the gun. Since the frequency with which a person pulls the bolt cannot be too high, the power output of the rifle cannot be too large, so the lethality is limited. The Maxim machine gun allows the energy generated by the gunpowder to be converted into the kinetic energy of the bullet, and the rest is used for the loading of the bullet, which is not wasted and saves manpower. On top of that, because mechanical work is more efficient than that of humans, it outputs much more power than a rifle, and its lethal power is huge. At the heart of the invention is to turn some manual steps into mechanical operations, and then use energy to drive the machinery.