“Uncovering the Hidden Genius: The Surprising Origins of the World’s First Machine Gun!”
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 But while such manually-operated firearms were eventually superseded by more advanced self-loading types, the Gatling gun mechanism lives on in modern aircraft-mounted rotary-barrelled cannons like the M61 Vulcan and the GAU-8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.
