Who Actually Invented the First Machine Gun?

“I never shall forget the way

That Blood upon this awful day

Preserved us all from death.

He stood upon a little mound,

Cast his lethargic eyes around,

And said beneath his breath :

“Whatever happens we have got

The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

This passage, from Hillaire Belloc’s 1898 poem The Modern Traveller, infamously captures the awesome destruction wrought by one of modern warfare’s key innovations: the machine gun. Putting the firepower of dozens of soldiers into the hands of just one, this weapon allowed the western colonial powers to conquer half the known world, ground the First World War into a bloody stalemate, helped the Nazis blitzkrieg their way across Europe, and remains a vital part of every army’s arsenal to this day. Yet despite its outsized impact on combat, the modern machine gun is less than a century and a half old. Why did it take so long for this weapon to be developed, and who was responsible for the vital breakthrough? Well, lock and load as we delve into the fascinating history of the machine gun.

Automatic fire has long been a part of warfare, with volleys of arrows fired by masses of archers playing a key role in battles from antiquity to the late middle ages. Placing such firepower in the hands of a single soldier, however, was another matter entirely. In the late 15th Century, Italian renaissance man extraordinaire Leonardo da Vinci sketched a number of ingenious engines of war in his notebooks, including an arrow-firing “machine gun” comprising no fewer than sixteen crossbows mounted on a rotating wheel. One version of this device was driven by a man-powered treadmill, which automatically cocked the bowstrings as it rotated. Yet another sketch depicts a spring-powered catapult with multiple arms for throwing stones in rapid succession. In Leonardo’s day, cannons were just starting to appear on the battlefield, but they were slow and tedious to reload; so, naturally, Leonardo also designed artillery pieces featuring multiple barrels to increase their firepower. As with most of Leonardo’s inventions, however, there is no evidence that any of these weapons were ever actually built.

The weapon commonly cited as being the world’s first “true” machine gun is the Puckle Gun, patented in 1718 by London lawyer James Puckle. However, strictly speaking this is not quite accurate, since a machine gun is typically defined as a weapon which can fire multiple shots in quick succession by turning a crank or – by the modern definition – pulling the trigger. Rather, Puckle’s gun is more accurately described as a rapid-firing revolver cannon, more akin to a modern revolver. That said, it was amongst the first, if not the first gun, to ever be called a machine gun when, in a 1722 shipping manifest, it was noted that the ship had on board “2 Machine Guns of Puckles.”

Curiously modern looking in its design, the Puckle Gun boasted a 3 foot long barrel and was designed to sit atop a tripod. It could also swivel and be aimed in any direction extremely rapidly with little effort by the operator due to how well balanced it was.

Once the prototype was completed in 1717, Puckle approached the British Navy who, at the time, were having a lot of trouble with Ottoman pirates. You see, the large, broadside cannons their ships were equipped with were a poor weapon of choice to use against tiny, fast moving vessels that could quite literally run circles around the bigger craft.

Puckle felt his gun was perfect for this use-case. Ships could quite easily have several of the Puckle guns mounted all around the perimeter of the deck and fire at approaching pirates with incredible speed for the age.

Intrigued, officials from the English Board of Ordnance were sent to observe a demonstration of the gun in 1717 in Woolwich. Unfortunately for Puckle, while they were reportedly impressed with the speed at which it could launch projectiles of death, and how quickly it could be reloaded, they decided to pass.

Their objections to it were primarily that it featured an unreliable flintlock system and it was too complex to be easily manufactured, including requiring many custom made components that gunsmiths at that point didn’t have, all combined making it difficult to mass produce. On top of that, it didn’t exactly lend itself to a variety of tactical situations due to its size.

Unperturbed at the initial rejection, Puckle continued to refine the design, patenting a better version of the gun a year later in 1718. Said patent, No. 418, describes the gun as being primarily for defensive purposes and notes that it is ideal for defending “bridges, breaches, lines and passes, ships, boats, houses and other places” from pesky foreigners.

A natural salesman, Puckle went as far as putting advertising of sorts right in his patent, with the second line of said patent reading: “Defending KING GEORGE your COUNTRY and LAWES – Is Defending YOUR SELVES and PROTESTANT CAUSE”

This is an idea Puckle would double down on by including engravings on the gun itself featuring things like King George, imagery of Britain and random bible verses.

To doubly sell potential investors on the value of the gun as a stalwart defender of Christian ideology, Puckle’s patent also describes how the gun could, in a pinch, fire square bullets.

What does this have to do with religion?

Puckle thought that square bullets would cause significantly more damage to the human body and believed that if they were shot at Muslim Turks (who the British were fighting at the time), it would, to quote the patent, “convince [them] of the benefits of Christian civilisation”.

The gun could also fire regular, round projectiles too (which Puckle earmarked as being for use against Christians only). On top of that, it also fired “grenados”, shot, essentially comprising of many tiny bullets- you know, for when you really wanted to ruin someone’s day.

Puckle began selling shares of his company to the public in 1720 for about 8 pounds a piece (about £1,100 pounds or $1,600 today) to finance construction of more advanced Puckle Guns, one of which was demonstrated to the public on March 31, 1722.

During said demonstration, as described in the London Journal: “[O]ne man discharged it 63 times in seven Minutes, though all while Raining, and it throws off either one large or sixteen Musquet Balls at every discharge with great force…”

Despite the impressive and reliable display, the British military on the whole was still uninterested in the newfangled technology.

That said, there was at least one order, placed by then Master-General of Ordnance for Britain, Duke John Montagu, for two of the guns to bring along in an attempt to capture St. Vincent and St. Lucia in the Caribbean. Whether these ever ended up being used or not isn’t clear.

Summing up Puckles’ failed invention and company, one sarcastic reporter for the London Journal quipped that the gun had “only wounded [those] who have shares therein.” Burn.

In any event, it would be another century and a half before the first true rapid-fire weapon appeared on the battlefield: the French mitrailleuse. Invented in 1851 by Belgian Army Captain Toussaint Fafschamps, the mitrailleuse comprised a cluster of fifty rifled barrels mounted on a conventional wheeled artillery carriage. The ammunition, consisting of a lead bullet and paper cartridge fired by a spring-loaded needle, was held in a removable breech block which was inserted into the rear of the weapon. The operator then turned a crank on the side of the breech, which fired each barrel in quick succession. While Fafschamp’s design was adopted by the Belgian Army, it was soon improved by engineers Louis Christophe and Joseph Montigny, who in 1859 presented their 37-barrel version to French Emperor Napoleon III. Impressed, Napoleon ordered the immediate development of an improved version under the greatest of secrecy, paying for the whole project out of his personal funds. This resulted in the French Army officially adopting a 25-barrel mitrailleuse designed by Jean-Baptiste de Reffye in 1865

While today machine guns are mainly used like rapid-firing rifles for laying down suppressive fire or engaging quick-moving targets, the operational doctrine for the mitrailleuse was somewhat different. For much of history, artillery was equipped to fire not only single solid cannonballs or explosive shells, but also large numbers of smaller projectiles called grapeshot or canister shot for use against infantry at close range – effectively turning them into giant shotguns. In French, this type of ammunition is known as mitraille – hence the name mitrailleuse. However, in 1858 the French Army adopted a Beaulieu 4-pounder rifled field gun, which while considerably more accurate and long-ranged than earlier artillery, was not well-suited to firing anti-personnel rounds. Consequently, as Reffye pointed out:

“In combat are found many circumstances where infantry, finding itself within range of artillery, the latter cannot resist the rapid fire of the rifle and, if the infantry, not letting itself be intimidated by the detonations of the pieces and the bursting of the shells, marched resolutely towards batteries themselves undefended by infantry, it would soon reduce them to silence by eliminating their crews…Since the war of secession in America, one has sought to build a weapon which could imitate the rapidity of fire of the rifle, while surpassing it in range, reliably striking infantry and cavalry at distances where canister loses its effectiveness. The bullet-canon has thus been developed to go into action between 900 and 2500 metres, with more accuracy than the old grape-shot which seems almost to have fallen into disuse nowadays.”

Thus, the mitrailleuse was conceived not as a rapid-firing rifle, but as a longer-ranged version of canister shot, with the weapons being deployed alongside regular artillery batteries. The mitrailleuse first saw combat during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871, but despite the Napoleon’s high hopes for his Army’s high-tech “secret weapon”, it proved a disappointment. However, this had more to do with French doctrine than the design of the weapon itself, for on those rare instances when it was used at close range, it proved devastatingly effective. As one observer noted at the September 1, 1870 Battle of Sedan:

“On the heights, close to Floeing, there was placed a battery of Mitrailleuses. There is, opposite to that, a round hill with wood on the top; and out of this wood and from behind this hill came the Prussian columns. As they came out they were swept down by these Mitrailleuses, and they did not succeed. They could not make any progress, but were obliged to go back again, and go round on the reverse slope of the hill, checked by the Mitrailleuse.”

But despite the mitrailleuse being the first rapid-fire weapon to see combat in large numbers – indeed, in modern French the term mitrailleuse means “machine gun” – it is more properly classified as a volley gun than a proper machine gun since the ammunition is loaded manually rather than automatically. Much closer to the modern definition was the Gatling gun, patented by American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861. Unlike the mitrailleuse, whose barrels were fixed, the Gatling gun’s ten barrels rotated around a central shaft, driven by a hand crank. As a barrel rotated into the top position, a cartridge dropped from a gravity-fed hopper and was automatically loaded into the chamber. When the barrel reached the bottom position, the cartridge was fired. The empty cartridge was then ejected from the chamber before the barrel reached the top position and the whole cycle began anew. The use of multiple barrels allowed each one to cool off between firings, preventing the weapon from overheating and allowing it to sustain continuous fire at a rate of up to 200 rounds per minute.

Gatling’s inspiration for creating his gun was surprisingly humanitarian. As a physician, Gatling knew that the vast majority of casualties in war were not caused by bullets or shells but disease. Thus, as he later wrote to a friend in 1877:

“It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”

But like all weapons intended to be so powerful they would end war, the Gatling gun only succeeded in increasing its efficiency and bloodiness. While the Union Army refused to adopt the weapon during the Civil War on the grounds of complexity and cost, Gatling guns did see use at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in the spring of 1865. Based on its brutal effectiveness in that battle, the Army finally adopted the Gatling gun the following year. Other nations soon followed, including the British Empire, Argentina, Peru, Siam, and Korea. But while the Gatling gun was originally intended for use by and against modern, industrialized armies, it was most effectively employed against poorly armed opponents in colonial wars. For example, the British Empire used Gatling guns to devastating effect against the Zulu in South Africa and the Mahdists in Sudan, while back in the United States the weapon was widely deployed against Native Americans and striking workers.

Several other hand-cranked machine guns were developed during this period including the single-barrelled Agar or “coffee mill” gun, introduced in 1861 and used in limited numbers during the Civil War – mainly to guard bridges, narrow passes, and other strategic targets. There was also the Gardner Gun and the multiple-barrelled Nordenfelt gun, both used in small numbers by the British Army and Royal Navy. But while such manually-operated firearms were eventually superseded by more advanced self-loading types, the Gatling gun mechanism lives on in modern aircraft-mounted rotary-barrelled cannons like the M61 Vulcan and the GAU-8 Avenger, which are driven by electric motors. And in 1963, General Electric miniaturized the mechanism to chamber the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, creating the famous M134 Minigun immortalized in such films as Predator and Terminator 2. Thanks to their electric drives and the self-cooling properties of the multi-barrel design and the high speed, these weapons are able to reach blistering rates of fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute.

But while closer to the modern definition of a machine gun, the Gatling, Agar, Gardner, Nordenfelt and their ilk still lacked one critical feature: self-loading – the ability to use the leftover energy from a fired cartridge to cycle the action automatically. While many inventors throughout the 19th Century attempted to develop such a weapon, they were all stymied by the same technical limitation: gunpowder. Virtually unchanged since its invention in China in the 9th Century, black gunpowder created large amounts of residue or fouling that quickly clogged up the mechanisms of early would-be machine guns, making sustained fire impossible. In 1886, however, the French Army introduced an innovation that would change the face of warfare: Poudre B or “smokeless powder”, which burned hotter, faster, and cleaner than traditional gunpowder. And as luck would have it, just two years earlier an American inventor had patented the perfect weapon to use this new powder.

Born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was a prolific inventor, his various creations including a bronchitis inhaler, the first automatic fire sprinkler system, an early version of the lightbulb, and an amusement park ride called the “Captive Flying Machine” which is still used to this day. He was also one of many inventors competing with the Wright Brothers to build the first powered, heavier-than-air flying machine. But Maxim’s greatest claim to fame would come as a result of a chance encounter in 1882. As he later recounted to the Times of London:

“I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.’ ”

Over the next four years, Maxim toiled in his London workshop to perfect such a weapon, which he inevitably dubbed the Maxim Gun. Unlike its predecessors, the Maxim Gun was recoil-operated, using the recoil impulse generated by each cartridge firing to push back the sliding barrel and cycle the weapon’s action – no hand-cranking or other external power source required. The weapon was fed from a long cloth belt of ammunition while its barrel was wrapped in a metal jacket full of cooling water, allowing it to sustain firing rates as high as 600 rounds per minute for long periods of time. When first introduced, the Maxim gun was designed to use then-standard black powder cartridges; however, it was soon adapted for the newly-invented smokeless powder.

In 1886, with funding from the Vickers engineering firm, Maxim founded the Maxim Gun Company to produce and sell his invention. Though it was more reliable and could deliver greater firepower than any other weapon on the market, the real genius of Maxim’s design lay in its adaptability; by swapping out just a handful of parts, the weapon could be made to shoot just about any cartridge. This made the gun an immediate international bestseller, with over 30 countries ordering Maxim guns in dozens of different calibers. Like the Gatling gun before it, the Maxim soon became closely associated with colonial conquest – especially during the late 19th Century “Scramble for Africa.” For example, during the 1893-1894 Matabele War in what is now Zimbabwe, British Maxim guns succeeded in holding off a force of 5,000 Ndebele warriors – killing some 1,600. Indeed, the battle was so lopsided that some surviving warriors committed suicide by throwing themselves onto their spears.

 

Like Richard Gatling 20 years before, many believed that the Maxim Gun would make war between civilized nations unthinkable, bringing about a new era of peace. As the New York Times argued in 1897:

“These are the instruments that have revolutionized the methods of warfare, and because of their devastating effects have made nations and riles give greater thought to the outcome of war before entering…They are peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors.”

But they were to be proven tragically wrong just 17 years later with the outbreak of the First World War – a conflict synonymous with the Maxim gun and industrialized slaughter. Though far more troops were killed by artillery than machine guns, the latter had an outsized psychological impact, cutting down scores of men like corn beneath the scythe and turning no-man’s-land between the trenches into impassable death traps. But the bloody stalemate the Maxim gun helped preserve also drove innovation in machine gun design. While reliable and deadly, the regular Maxim gun was heavy, awkward to move around, and required a team of at least four men to operate efficiently. Regaining the type of mobile warfare which had dominated the early months of the war required lighter, handier weapons that could be carried and operated by fewer men and deployed on the move. This requirement led to the development of a new generation of light machine guns like the British Lewis Gun, the French Chauchat, and the American Browning Automatic Rifle, which – along with improved tactics involving the coordinated use of artillery, aircraft, and tanks – eventually helped break the stalemate and bring about the Armistice of 1918. The machine gun’s place in modern warfare was secured.

While the Maxim Gun has largely been superseded by more modern designs, the OG machine gun continues to see service to this very day, with many examples recently showing up in the conflict in Ukraine. But what did Sir Hiram Maxim think of his most famous creation’s deadly legacy? While outwardly pleased by his success, Maxim at least seemed aware of the disturbing hypocrisy of the world around him. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Maxim – a lifelong bronchitis sufferer – invented a new type of medical inhaler which dispensed soothing pine vapour. The invention drew scorn from his fellow inventors, who accused him of “prostituting his talents” on quack science. To this accusation, Maxim responded:

“This is indeed a very curious world. I was the first man in the world to make an automatic gun. It is astonishing to note how quickly this invention put me on the very pinnacle of fame. Has it been anything else but a killing machine, very little would have been said of it. From the foregoing it will be seen that it is a very credible thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”

Expand for References