Guns, Machine

Historical Development

Despite their widespread military appeal, the impetus for adopting machine guns began in the private sector. During the 19th century, newly formed corporate entities found particular utility in the concept of sustained automatic fire for the purposes of dissuading working-class protests. Though initially wary of employing them against each other, European colonial powers married the machine gun with their expansionist designs, depending on them as force multipliers to deter natives from resisting European colonial influence. This led to the famous adage of the historian Hilaire Belloc in The Modern Traveller, 1898: “Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not” (p. 37).

Richard Gatling was the first to patent a modestsized, reliably functioning machine gun in November 1862. Crank operated, it fired 200 rounds a minute. Gatling cited the American Civil War (1861–1865) as the inspiration for his invention; ironically, he believed the gun would obviate the need for massive mobilization because a single soldier could wield the firepower of hundreds with a single Gatling gun. Though the gun only saw service in the very last year of the war, it impressed other nations, including England, Japan, and Russia, which quickly placed orders for Gatling guns.

In 1884, Gatling’s hand-cranked version gave way to Hiram Maxim’s gun. It was a “true” machine gun, capable of continuous fire by harnessing recoil energy to eject and load cartridges. The user merely had to depress the trigger to sustain fire. Though at first Maxim had difficulty persuading militaries to adopt his creation in their service, eventually, by way of a competitive set of corporate mergers, his gun achieved moderate sales success and made it to European powers in the two decades following its invention. It was on the battlefields of World War I, however, that sales skyrocketed and the true potential of the Maxim gun was realized.

The machine gun came of age during World War I. At first, the major European powers failed to recognize the potential of Maxim’s gun, now 21 years old. Nevertheless, the weapon increased in prominence as the war progressed until, eventually, it came to dominate the battlefield. As the Western Front settled into a stalemate, the combatants distributed machine guns more and more throughout their lines to resist massive waves of infantry assault. The power of industrialized warfare, replete with artillery, gas attacks, and machine guns, created a vast wasteland known as “no man’s land” between the opposing European forces. In this climate, warring powers threw away entire generations of men against skillfully placed machine guns.

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