Maxim gun

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Maxim gun

Last Updated on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 11:41 Written by Administrator Thursday, 02 July 2009 03:11

The Maxim gun was the first portable and fully automatic machine gun. It was invented in the year 1884 by Sir Hiram Maxim, an American-born British inventor. The Maxim gun was mounted on tripods and used a belt feed. This made the gun easy to use and at the same time comparatively mobile.

The Maxim gun was much more efficient and effective that older guns such as the Gatling gun. It made use of the recoil force to expel the spent cartridge and load a new one. This gave the Maxim gun immense fire power. In fact, it was capable of firing more than 600 rounds per minute which was equivalent to the fire power of 30 breech loading rifles of that time.

Thought in theory the Maxim gun could be operated by a single soldier, a team of soldiers were always employed to man it. This was because it was bulky and several men were needed to move it. In addition, it also needed a continuous supply of water to cool the barrel.

The Maxim gun was first employed in 1886-90 during the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition by the famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley. It was used to scare the African natives and was not more of a military consideration. However, by the year 1893, the British colonial forces began to use it widely in their conquests of various countries of Africa and Asia. The Maxim played a pivotal role in hastening the European colonization of Africa in the coming years.

Though the Maxim gun was much more powerful than the older guns such as the Gatling gun, the various European Armies were slow to adopt it because of its tendency to get jammed at crucial times. Another reason for the initial reluctance in adopting the weapon was that it was easy to spot because of the large amount of smoke it generated. This problem was not to be overcome until the advent of smokeless powders. However, after the British Army adopted the in the year 1888, other colonial armies followed suit and purchased them in large numbers.

The Maxim gun was widely employed in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. Both the warring sides made widespread use of the gun accounting for more than half of all causalities in the conflict. The gun also saw major action in Russia in the following decades during the Russian Civil War after 1917.

By the First World War, several improvements were made in gun technology. European armies embraced newer and improved machine guns. However, many of these were based on the design of the Maxim gun. For example, the British Vickers machine gun was a redesigned and improved variant of the Maxim gun. Introduced in the year 1912, the gun found use for many decades until 1968. Other notable copies of the Maxim gun include the German Maschinengewehr 08 and the Russian Pulemyot Maxim.

Some common variants and derivatives of the Maxim gun: