Maxim Gun

Origins

Hiram Stevens Maxim was an American inventor who moved to Britain in 1881, and there, according to his own story, an acquaintance told him that if he wanted to make money he should invent something that would let Europeans cut each other's throats more easily. Earlier rapid-fire guns such as the Gatling were hand-cranked; Maxim's insight was that the recoil of each shot could do the work. He demonstrated a working automatic gun in 1884, founded the Maxim Gun Company with backing from Vickers, merged with the Swedish-British Nordenfelt concern in 1888, and in 1897 became part of Vickers, Sons & Maxim. The British Army adopted the gun in 1889, and it was soon sold or licensed to nearly every major army.

Design & Construction

In the Maxim, barrel and lock recoil together a short distance after firing; a toggle joint, like a knee, then breaks upward, unlocking the breech and throwing the lock back to extract the empty case, draw a fresh cartridge from the canvas belt and cock the firing pin, before a spring returns everything to fire again. The barrel sits in a water jacket holding about a gallon, which boiled off as steam during sustained fire but let the gun shoot for hours; crews collected the steam through a hose to condense and reuse the water. The early British guns fired the .577/450 Martini-Henry Rifle cartridge, later .303. The gun itself weighed about sixty pounds with water, and a tripod or wheeled carriage added as much again — a crew weapon, not an infantryman's.

Combat Use

The Maxim's first wars were colonial. In the First Matabele War of 1893 a few British South Africa Company Maxims broke massed charges at the Shangani River, and at Omdurman in 1898 Kitchener's Maxims helped kill some 10,000 of the Mahdist army for a few dozen British dead; Hilaire Belloc summed up the age in a couplet: "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not." The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 showed that both sides could have one. Germany built the Maxim as the MG 08, and in World War I its MG 08s, nicknamed "Spandau" by British troops after the arsenal, cut down the British attack on the first day of the Somme in July 1916. Russia fought with the PM M1910 on its wheeled Sokolov mount, and Britain with the Vickers, a lightened Maxim, alongside the lighter Lewis Gun.

Legacy

The Maxim gun changed warfare more than any other small arm. It made the massed infantry charge suicidal, drove armies underground into trench systems, and prompted the development of the tank to break the deadlock it created. Its direct descendants served for decades: the Vickers until 1968 in the British Army, and the Soviet Maxim through the Second World War and in Korea and Vietnam. Maxim was knighted in 1901. Early Maxims, MG 08s and Sokolov-mounted Russian guns are centerpieces of military museums and advanced collections.