
The mystery of the vanishing gun inventor (2013) - smacktoward
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23709471
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hnburnsy
More like 'mysterious vanishing of gun inventor'. Was so excited when I first
read the headline.

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csours
Do people generally understand that there's almost never a single inventor?
That the popularly credited inventor may not be?

There's some air of hidden secret about these articles: Did you know that
Edison didn't invent the light bulb! James Watt didn't invent the steam
engine! etc etc.

I don't know about you, but I can only invent one thing at a time, and complex
systems require a lot of invention. The incandescent light bulb requires
electricity, glass, partial vacuum, and very precise tungsten, among many
other things.

An efficient steam engine wants high quality steel, tight tolerances, good
valves, and no explosions (relief valve, vessel proofing).

A machine gun wants smokeless powder, good belts, many excellent identical
bullets with identical powder loads in identical cases with identical primers.

A machine gun needs some way to convert the energy of firing into the cycling
of the action to feed and fire the next round.

A machine gun needs to fire when the trigger is pulled, continue firing until
the trigger is no longer pulled, and stop firing when the trigger is released.

A machine gun needs a supply chain. It will consume _at least_ 20x more rounds
than an individual soldier (30 vs 600 rounds per minute). WWI was an
industrial war.

A machine gunner needs a place to stand. A machine gunner wants to be not shot
by snipers, not exploded by artillery or hand grenades. A machine gunner will
attract attention.

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This merely scratches the surface, of course, but I do wish people had more
respect for the complexities of the real world.

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SlowRobotAhead
Your knowledge of early machine guns needs some work. They weren’t belt fed,
but rather spring and crank run, more commonly box magazine fed than
belted/linked where the spring mechanism was in the magazine. The early
rotory/Gatling style guns were tube fed. Machine guns werent as common during
WWI as you may think, and this had nothing to do with “snipers” or obviousness
of machine gun placements.

The point that no one man builds everything is fine - except people like
Samuel Colt, Eugene Stoner and John Moses Browning were amazing inventors who
did single handedly change their industries, and I think fit the definition of
“single inventors” even if they weren’t smokeless powder chemists.

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manfredo
I thought the first firearm generally considered a machine gun (as opposed to
human powered Gatling guns) was the Maxim gun, which was belt fed. All the
major military powers in WWI other than France and Austria used Maxim guns or
derivates of it. Austria used what is essentially a delayed blowback operated
Maxim gun, and it was belt fed. Early _light_ machine guns were magazine fed
(e.g Bren Gun, BAR, Lewis Gun), but these aren't typically what militaries
typically refer to as "machine guns". Some called them automatic rifles to
distinguish them from machine guns.

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icegreentea2
I think Gatling gun and friends are definately considered "early" machine
guns, in that they fulfill what is probably the most important distinctive
feature of machine guns - relatively sustained periods of high rate of fire.

There are lots of ways to argue about what exactly defines a machine gun, but
if we take the perspective of what it's like to be shot at by one, I think we
can say that Gatling guns and friends are close enough that I don't really
think it matters.

This helps highlight juts HOW MUCH BETTER the Maxim gun was compared to
everything before it though.

