Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the National Firearms Centre in Leeds, part of the British Royal Armouries, where we are taking a look at one of Hiram Maxim's "Prototype"
machine guns. And that's Prototype with a capital "P", ... it's not quite the first gun he developed.
The historical sequence here was in 1883 Maxim had gotten the idea that you
could use the recoil energy of a firearm to ... basically do the work of loading the firearm and firing
the next shot, a self-loading or semi-automatic firearm. And mechanically speaking, semi-automatic and
fully automatic are two slight sides of the same coin. If you can make it do one you can mechanically
engineering-wise make it do the other. At any rate, in 1883 he filed a patent for,
well, a patent on the recoil system of operation. He was a sly guy, he was a very intelligent guy,
and he had a long background in invention and patenting and technology, and he understood
... kind of the nuances of the patent system. And so he crafted his patent to be as broad and
wide-ranging as possible, to cover basically any potential use of the whole concept of recoil operation. I should clarify this point, recoil
operation, what I mean by that is having some part of the gun
move backwards under recoil when firing, and then using that
mechanical energy to cycle a system. This is distinct from gas operation
where you are utilising pressure of gas generated by the gun powder in the barrel,
tapping some of that gas and using its pressure to do something else. So, those are the two main systems of
firearms operation that we still use today. At any rate, he basically tried to patent everything
that could conceivably be considered recoil operation. And the way he did this was actually to convert a
Winchester 1873 ... lever-action rifle to semi-automatic by basically ... removing the butt plate from
the butt of the gun, setting it back a little bit, and making it movable. So that when you
fired the gun the whole gun would cycle back into the buttstock, or into the
butt plate, that would push a piston. And he had redesigned the linkage so that
when the gun moved backwards it would actually cycle the action, doing the work
of the lever on a Winchester '73. So he's kind of hiding the fact that he is
interested in making a true machine gun like this, but in the patent he does
specify at the end that, by the way, this system is applicable to a machine gun, or
even a volley fire multi-barreled battery sort of gun. So in 1883 he gets a patent on that,
1884 he introduces this gun. The first gun he actually built he called the "Forerunner", and that was basically just a sort of a
shop proof-of-concept rig that would fire. This was his first actual standalone firearm. ... You could take this out in public and do
demonstrations with it, which he absolutely did. And this dates to 1884 when he released this. And it
was on the strength of this that in November of 1884 he created, along with investors,
the Maxim gun company. So, let's go ahead and take a look
inside here, let me show you how this works. Now I can't take it apart because, well,
it's kind of all riveted and screwed together, this is not a quick disassembly sort of thing.
And it is also virtually a one-of-a-kind gun. However, we are very fortunate that there's another YouTube
channel out there, a guy by the name of Rob Brassington, who has created a fantastic 3D animation of
exactly how this gun works down to all levels of detail. So I'll have a link to that at the end of this video, and I
strongly recommend that you take a look at it because watching his 3D animation, especially in conjunction
with being able to see the internals of this gun is... it's perfect. It really shows you ... it gives you a complete
understanding of how the gun works. So, let's take a look. Alright, so there are a couple sort of odd
features that we need to talk about on this thing, because it's not like a normal machine gun. So there's a bolt handle here, which
is fairly similar to the later Maxim guns. But there's no trigger on the back, this is
just a handle to pivot and direct the gun. And then you've got this thing.
This is both a safety lever, so in the full forward position
the gun is safe and can't fire, and then between here and here it is a rate
of fire control, and there is no separate trigger. So the way you would actually load
and fire this thing is: you put it on safe, you would then have an ammunition box down here. This fires from a belt of
ammunition that sits in this entire space. And the belt feeds up into this open sprocket. There are actually two sprockets,
two feed sprockets, in this gun. There is one here that cartridges come up in here,
they get pulled out backwards, rotated up to about here, and then pushed forward into a second
feed sprocket now that they are out of the belt. The second feed sprocket then
pushes them up into the chamber. So, to load the thing you put your belt
in here and then you actually have to cycle it a number of times to get your first
cartridge up through the bottom sprocket, through the top sprocket, and
into the chamber ready to fire. So you do that by cycling a charging handle. If you watch down here you can
see that sprocket moving as I do this. And of course you may have noticed that
this is not a unidirectional charging handle, it alternates. First shot it pivots down
like that, and that's one complete shot. Second round it will come back up to the top. And I'm not quite cycling it all the way, it is
this last bit right there that actually fires the gun. So when you're loading it, you can actually
just cycle back to here and that's enough that you can bring cartridges up
into position ready to fire. Then, once you are ready to fire, what you do is actually pull
the crank handle back and it acts like an accelerator. As we will see in just a moment, the act of pulling this
on to the slow position will actually fire the first round, that's what starts the thing shooting. And then you move it to whatever rate of fire you
want, up to a maximum of 500 rounds per minute. When you are done shooting, you crank it back
to the safe position and that will stop it from firing. So kind of an awkward thing, especially considering that
... to operate this you've got your arm very close to this lever, which especially when you're, you know,
stopping the gun, this thing is cycling back and forth potentially very quickly when you have to reach past it. So, you know, this is like I said earlier, this is a
proof of concept, this is a demonstration sort of piece. This is far from the final
efficient military version of the gun. Alright, now let's take a look inside. So there are
little latches that allow us to open the back cover, and the front cover. I can only hold one open
at a time, but bring the camera inside here. A lot of this will look fairly familiar, at least familiar in concept,
to someone who's looked at the inside of a Maxim gun. But there are a few differences. So when we cycle this,
you can see the sort of toggle link system back here. And then this bar is connected to the rate of fire indicator
on the side. So there are two things to show you on this. The first is this connecting rod,
which runs towards the front of the gun, and when I move the lever, I'm pulling
this bar back and forth, we'll get to that next. The other thing is this little cam surface on
the bar, and that actually is the trigger of the gun. So what happens is we have our firing sear right here, and when this goes back, it
... drops the hammer, fires the cartridge. When the gun is set in the safe position down here. that cam is rotated out of position, so that when
... I have the bolt completely closed and in battery the sear doesn't contact that cam. However, when we pull the rate of fire lever back, you
can see right there the sear gets pushed backwards. So ... that is safe, and then that is firing. Once the gun is actually in operation, this whole
assembly is cycling back and forth with the gun, ... back like this, it'll chamber a round.
And as soon as it goes all the way forward, that stroke right there, it is locking the
locking surface and then immediately firing, so. In addition when you're loading the
gun, you start with it on safe like this, and once you're ready to start firing, when
you pull that back, as you can see right there, it contacts the sear, releases the
hammer, and starts the firing process. Now the front half of this rod is connected
to a hydraulic buffer system out here. So as I move the lever forward and
back, you can see we're rotating this. What that's doing is adjusting the size of a,
basically, a bleed hole in this hydraulic buffer. There is a lug on the barrel right there, and then this (if I cycle that), so there's the barrel having recoiled. When it
fires it'll recoil back like this, pull the piston out cycle, cycle, cycle, and then when it goes back into battery you can see here that this lug has pushed
on this and pushed this whole hydraulic piston back into its buffer assembly. Now this isn't full
of oil right now, so it's not quite working exactly like ... it's designed to. What actually happens is right
here, this thing traveling back in, that can only go in as fast as it
can push oil through the bleed hole, whose size is controlled by this lever. So the smaller the bleed hole the longer
time it takes for this to push forward like that. And then because of the trigger assembly you just saw, as soon
as it goes into battery like this, it's going to drop the hammer and fire. That is how the rate of fire was actually
technically controlled, and that is how Maxim was able to reduce this to, if he wanted,
theoretically, as low as like one round per minute. The way modern machine guns do differential
rates of fire is generally done with bolt weight, not with hydraulic buffers. So today the
concept of having a rate of fire that's that low is kind of mechanically impossible
because of the way that our machine guns work. This was totally different and because it
was certainly simple enough conceptually to have a bleed hole small enough that as long
as you're exerting continuous pressure it takes 60 seconds to push this all the way back in. And Maxim actually did that. There was some
theory at the time that you could take a gun like this, set it up to one round
per minute, and train it on say some enemy fortification that you
were busy blowing up with artillery, and by having this very sporadic
harassing fire all the way through the night without needing anyone in attendance at the gun, you could, say, prevent the enemy from
coming out and making repairs at night. So that of course got dropped, the ultimate production
Maxims would not have any rate of fire adjustment. They would all fire at about 600 rounds per minute.
That could be adjusted to a client's desire within an appropriate range, but this whole system would go
away. But it's one of the coolest parts to me of this early design. Now there are a couple other things that we can
look at here. We have an accelerator lever right here, connected to the barrel. So when the barrel comes back,
this side of the lever right there is going to hit a block here, right there, and when it pivots like that it is
kicking back this, which throws the bolt back. We have our locking surface right here. When the gun goes fully into
battery you can see that that drops, and locks under this very
heavy lug, block of metal there. When the barrel recoils it is going to pull that out from under its locking block, that ... disconnects the bolt assembly from the barrel
assembly, allows the bolt to reciprocate backwards, which we can see here at the back end of the gun, and continue with the cycle. Looking at the left side of the gun, we have
what looks like it should be the feed side, but it's not. Note that when I cycle this, that spindle is going the wrong direction. And if you fed
a belt in here, it would just jam it down into this plate. So this is simply where the empty belt comes out, and then this is the ejection port.
The way that this thing works it will pull a cartridge off the bottom spindle here, ... pulls it off the top, brings it back here,
where then is loaded into this spindle. It then rotates around 180 degrees to the top, where the bolt pushes it into the
chamber, fires it, and then extracts it back out into the same slot
in this spindle that it started in. The bolt then releases the cartridge,
the spindle rotates another position, and a new live round is brought
up in the top slot ready to fire. However, what that also means is that the
empty cases are retained in the spindle here, and when they get to this position
they simply fall out the side of the gun. Like that. A couple other things to point out. You'll
notice that there is a front sight offset here. There would originally have been a
rear sight mounted to the side of the gun, unfortunately it is missing on this particular example. There is also a water jacket here that ... doesn't
have really the drain and fill capacity figured out. There's a plug here that you
can use to fill the gun with water, that would be refined quite a bit more,
of course, as the gun was developed further. Maxim was also the first guy to come up
with the concept of water cooling the gun, and he very carefully calculated exactly
how much water he would need based on how much heat was generated by a single cartridge, and he was the guy who realised that ... water
absorbs a lot more heat, a lot more energy, to increase in temperature than say
iron or steel. So it makes a more efficient dissipater or absorber of
thermal energy on a machine gun. You're better off having a water jacket
than having a barrel of equal thickness. We have a couple controls here on the
tripod. There is an elevation screw right there. There's also a windage crank
that allows you to turn the gun by crank handle instead of just by hand. So if we take this awkward view
looking up at the underside of the gun, you can actually see the feedway right here.
This is going to feed cartridges straight up into the bottom of the gun. You can see this bar right here, which
is there basically as a guide for the belt. So it goes in between that bar
and this side of the receiver, and you can see the feed spindle rotating
which will pull cartridges straight up. Now of course this gun isn't ultimately going to be...
you know, this is only a public demonstration sort of thing. And this has some critical problems,
namely it's chambered for .45 Gardner Gatling It's a ... black powder cartridge, because when this
is made in 1884 smokeless powder doesn't exist yet. One of the things that we've discussed repeatedly is that there
was no possibility of a machine gun before smokeless powder, because the fouling and the heat
from black powder cartridges simply make the concept of a machine gun
impractical and impossible. You're gonna get... You will have to clean the gun often enough that
you lose all the benefit of it being fully automatic. Now Maxim was working on trying to solve that problem. Even as smokeless powder was being invented, he was patenting things like a device that kind
of looks like a suppressor for the end of this gun, but what it's really there to do is filter out the
smoke and trap it. ... You can imagine firing a 600 round per minute burst of black powder cartridges
results in this huge cloud of smoke that you can't see through. ... You know, the enemy of course can very clearly see where the
machine gun is, and the gunner himself can't see his targets. Well, Maxim was working on a way to
basically trap and clean the smoke out so that it wasn't released and so you didn't have that problem. He was working on actually sort of like a
gas operating system with a liquid intermediary to try and ... bypass some of the problems of black powder
fouling in the barrel and the operating mechanism. ... Fortunately for Maxim, he
was able to just drop all of that in 1885/1886 when ... smokeless powder was
invented and very quickly became known worldwide. It was a very secret French thing at first,
but it took very little time for it to become accessible to basically everybody.
So with the advent of smokeless powder, then we would see Maxim really able to economise,
make this gun more efficient in design, shrink it down tremendously. And we would end up with the whole
progression of what we recognise today as the early Maxim guns. So it is extremely cool to be able to take a look at this. There are three of these guns
known to exist today that I'm aware of. One of them is actually on public
display at the Royal Armouries in Leeds, and that's actually the earliest one I believe. It has
a bit of a different buffer and cyclic rate system to it. Then there's this one, and there's
one that I believe is identical to it in the possession of the
US Marine Corps at Quantico. So this one and the Marine Corps one are
the model that was actually publicised by Maxim. When you look at pictures of some of the old conventions,
trade shows ... this is the gun that you'll see. The picture of Maxim posing with one of these is this model. And that's not every day that
you get to take a look inside one. So a big thanks to the National Firearms
Centre for letting me bring this one to you guys. The NFC is perhaps the best
gun collection in Europe, and it is open on a limited basis to the public. If you
are a researcher, if you're someone who has an articulable reason for wanting to come in and take a look at
their collection, it is something that you can absolutely do. So I've got a link to them as well in
the description and check them out ... if this is the sort of thing that you
need to get access to for a cool project. Thanks for watching.
