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Machine Gun History

             With a domestic invention comes household innovations and with a military invention comes a revolution in military affairs. A revolution in military affairs is a fundamental change in the nature of warfare. With the invention of the machine gun came such a revolution in military affairs. Machine gun where used as early as the civil war although it was a very crude primitive weapon. Tactics had not changed from the civil war to WWI. The standard tactics of the war was an infantry charge but with a weapon that is capable of firing 600 rounds a minute there was huge casualties. Almost before soldiers could get out of the trenches in a charge they were cut down.
             The machine gun known as the queen of the battlefield during World War 1 was originally invented by Hiram Maxim in 1884. Though there was other types of automatic guns this was the first weapon able to sustain firing without external support. The British army bought the machine gun in 1890. By the time of the First World War the machine gun was used by all major powers however Germans had 20 times the amount of machine guns compared to the allied forces. British officers were unsure of the effectiveness of the weapon and only issues two per battalion. The 1914 machine gun weighed 30-60kg, took a crew of 4-6 men to operate it, and was normally positioned on a flat tripod. These guns would rapidly overheat and become unusable with in minutes if fired continuously. There were two was that the gun was cooled, water cooled and air cooled. Water cooled machine guns have a water filled jacket which required the crew to carry large amounts of water with them. It was not unheard of crew urinating in the jacket to cool the weapon. Air cooled machine guns had air vents built into the weapon. Because of the weight and the water needed to cool the weapon the machine gun became a defensive weapon. It was not until 1915 when allied forces adopted the Lewis gun.


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