Firepower by Paul Lockhart

Author:Paul Lockhart [Lockhart, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

IMPRESSIVE AS THE Reffye and the Gatling might appear from our vantage point in the twenty-first century, they did not have an appreciable impact on the conduct of war. The Reffye could have, perhaps, had the French army—which had so enthusiastically embraced the mitrailleuse—actually found a way to integrate it into its tactics. The Gatling never had a chance, not in land warfare, because it didn’t really have a niche, as the balance of bulkiness, range, and rate of fire did not work in its favor. It’s easy to succumb to the temptation, as many armchair ordnance experts do, to see the Gatling as yet another promising technology cast to the side by unimaginative, hidebound conservatives who were dismissive of anything new. The Gatling never had a chance because there really was very little it could add to the tactical potential of armies at the turn of the century, certainly nothing that would justify the expense and trouble. To be truly effective, rapid-fire small arms would have to be portable in a way that the cannon-sized Gatlings were not.

Enter Hiram Maxim and his invention, brilliant and terrible.

The Maxim has to rank at the very top of historic weapons designs by virtue of its sheer simplicity and sophistication. Maxim took out a flurry of patents before he publicly debuted his prototype gun, and that act alone proves the depth of his understanding of firearms technology. The American expat perceived, with enviable clarity, that the energy unleashed by the detonation of ammunition in a firearm could be collected and redirected in more ways than one. Maxim discerned three ways in particular. First there was the “recoil-operated” action, which used the retrograde motion of the barrel—recoil—to power the gun’s loading and firing mechanism. Closely related to recoil operation was what is known today as a “blowback” action, harnessing the energy created by the propellant at detonation, the same energy that would propel a spent case out of an open breech. Finally, there was the energy provided by excess gas moving forward behind the bullet, venting out the muzzle when the bullet left the barrel. Weapons that use this surplus gas are said to be “gas-operated.” Maxim patented designs to use each of the three. He was an entrepreneur, after all, and rightly or wrongly he felt he had been cheated out of the wealth and acclaim that he believed were rightfully his but stolen by Thomas Edison.

The Maxim gun was recoil-operated, and it was simplicity itself. The ammunition fed into the gun via a fabric belt, much like a soldier’s bandolier, with the rounds held in place—parallel to each other—with fabric loops. The belt entered the gun through the feed block, mounted immediately above the breech-end of the weapon’s single barrel. Behind the barrel was a steel box, the receiver, rectangular in cross section, which housed the operating mechanism. Inside the receiver, a set of rails ran along the right and left sides, and on those rails rested the truly critical element, the lock.

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