The flame-thrower, brought terror to French and British soldiers when used by the German army in the early phases of the First World War in 1914 and 1915 was by no means a particularly innovative weapon.
The basic idea of a flame-thrower is to spread fire by launching burning fuel. .
The flame-thrower was developed at the turn of the 20th century. The German army tested two models of flame-thrower - or Flammenwerfer in German - in the early 1900s, one large and one small, both developed by Richard Fiedler.
The smaller, lighter Flammenwerfer (the Kleinflammenwerfer) was designed for portable use carried by a single man. Using pressurized air and carbon dioxide or nitrogen it belched a stream of burning oil for as much as 54 feet.
Fielder's second, larger model the Grossflammenwerfer. Worked along the same lines but was not made for transport by a single person, but whose maximum range was twice that of the smaller model. it could also sustain flames for an impressive forty seconds, although it was decidedly expensive in its use of fuel.
The machine gun, usually positioned on a flat tripod, would require a gun crew of four to six operators. In theory they could fire 400-600 small-calibre rounds per minute, a figure that was to more than double by the war's end, with rounds fed via a fabric belt or a metal strip.
The reality however was that these early machine guns would rapidly overheat and become inoperative without the aid of cooling mechanisms; they were consequently fired in short rather than sustained bursts. Cooling generally took one of two forms: water cooled and, increasingly as the war developed, air cooled. Water jackets would provided for the former (which held around one gallon of liquid) and air vents would be built into the machine gun for the latter.
Water cooled machine guns would still overheat relatively quickly (sometimes within two minutes), with the consequence that large supplies of water would need to be on hand in the heat of a battle - and, when these ran out, it was not unknown for a machine gun crew to solve the problem by urinating into the jacket.
