Inventions of the Great War

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War period, and the lad did not know just how to hold it. He let the butt of the gun rest uncertainly against him, i

y on his flesh but on his mind as well. It gave him

. It was a useless prank of the gun, he thought, a waste of good energy. Why could not th

the empty case of the cartridge just fired, select a fresh cartridge from the belt, and cock the main spring; then the mechanism would return, throwing the empty cartridge-case out of the gun, pushing the new cartridge into the barrel, closing the breech, and finally pulling the trigg

S TEN-BAR

r more fond of tinkering with machinery than of doling out pills. He invented a number of clever mechanisms, but the one that made him really famous was that machine-gun. At first our government did not take the invention seriously. The gun was tried out in the war, but whenever it went i

held its own for many years; but eventually it had to succumb. The Maxim did not have to be cranked: it fired itself, which was a distinct advantage; and then, inst

S A GAS

e order as an automobile engine, and really the resemblance is very close. The barrel of the gun is the cylinder of the engine; the bullet is the piston; and for fuel gunpowder is used in place of gasol

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ch produces its o

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mes of gas. In the case of the gun the gas is formed almost instantly and in such quantity that it has to drive the bullet out of the barrel to make room for itself. In the cartridge that our army uses, only about a tenth of an ounce of smoke

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and. What he did was to bore a hole through the side of the gun-barrel. When the gun was fired, nothing happened until the bullet passed this hole; then some of the gas that was pushing the bullet before it would blow out through the hole. But this would be a very small amount indeed, for the instant that the bullet passed out of the barrel the gases would

on. This piston was given a shove, and that gave a lever a kick which set going the mec

G RID

ggest problems that has to be dealt with. In a gasolene-engine the heat is carried off in one of three ways: (1) by passing water around the cylinders; (2) by building flanges around the cylinders to carry the heat off into the air; and (3) by using a fan to blow cool air against the cylinders. All of these schemes are used in the machine-gun. In Dr. Gatl

wning decided to do away with in his machine-gun. Instead of water he used air to carry off the heat. The more surface the air touches, the more heat will it carry away; and so the Colt gun was at first made with a very thick-walled barrel. But later the Colt was formed with flanges, like the flanges on a motor-cycle engine, so as to increase the surface of the barrel. Of course, air-cooling is not so effective as water-cooling, but it is claimed for this gun, and for other mac

OF OVER

very far through the air, to say nothing of penetrating steel armor. To gain the spinning-motion the bullet must fit into the barrel snugly enough to squeeze into the spiral grooves. Now there is another American machine-gun known as the Hotchkiss, which was used to a considerable extent by the French Army. It is a gas-operated gun, something like the Colt, and it is air-cooled. It was found in tests of the Hotchkiss gun that in from three to four minutes of firing the barrel was expanded so much that the shots began to be a little unce

nother invention-that, too, by an American. Colonel I. N. Lewis, of the United States Army, conceived of a machine-gun that would be cooled not by still air but by air in motion. Thi

ing the port, but in that brief interval there is a puff of gas in the cylinder which drives back a piston. This piston has teeth on it which engage a small gear connected with a main-spring. When the piston moves back, it winds the spring, and it is this spring that operates the mechanism of the gun. The cartridges, instead of being taken

BULLET TO

t each end so that the air can flow through it, but it extends beyond the muzzle of the barrel, and there it is narrowed down. At the end of the barrel there is a mouthpiece so shaped that the bullet, as it flies through, sucks a lot of air in its wake, making a strong current flow through the sixteen channel

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axim, the inventor of high explosives, who has always been an American to the core. Of course we must not get the impression that only Americans have invented machine-guns. There have been inventors of such weapons in various countries of

NING MAC

patriotically offered it to our government without charging patent royalties. But the army officials would not accept it, although many Lewis guns were bought by the navy. This raised a storm of protest throughout the country until finally

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German Mach

ne-gun. However, it was classed as a heavy gun and was operated from a tripod. The new machine used recoil to operate its mechanism. The construction was simple, there were few parts, and the gun could very quickly be taken apart in case of breakage or disarrangement of the mechanism. But the greatest car

In fact, it was really a machine-rifle. The regular .30-caliber service cartridges were used, and these were stored in a clip holding twenty cartridges. The cartridges could be fired one at a time, or the entire clip could be fired in two and a half seconds. It took but a second

e heavy and the light gun were proof against mud, sand, and dust of the battle-field. But best of all, a man did not have to have highly specialized training before he could use the Browning rifle. It did not require a crew to operate one of these guns. Each soldier could have his own machine-gun and carry it in a charge as he would a rifle

when he was but fourteen years of age he invented an improved breech mechanism which was later used in the Winchester repeater. Curiously enough, it was a Browning pistol that was used by the assassin at Serajevo who killed t

INE-GUN

was thought of as a cannon. In the Franco-Prussian War the French had a machine-gun by which they set great store. It was called a mitrailleuse, or a gun for firing grape-shot. It was something like the Gatling. The French counted on this machine to surprise and overwhelm the Germans. But they made the mistake of considering it a piece of artillery and fired it from long range, so that i

e war went on, both the Russians and the Japanese bought up all the machine-guns they could secure. They learned what could be

le he is falling to the ground. And so it does not pay to fire the gun continuously in one direction, unless there is a dense mass of troops charging upon it. Usually the machine-gun is sw

NE-GU

heir great howitzers and hurled undreamed-of quantities of high explosives on these forts, they broke and crumbled to pieces. Then it was predicted that the day of the fort was over. But

them, because the first ones they ran across were round in shape and something like a pill-box in appearance. These pill-boxes were just large enough to house a few men and a couple of machine-guns. Concealment was of the

where a large garrison of gunners could live. These forts were known as Mebus, a word made from the

round had to be thoroughly searched by the big guns for any machine-gun nests. Unless these were found and destroyed by shell-fire, the only way that re

he path of a projectile

ht machine-gun could go right along with a charging body of troops and do very efficient service, particularly in fighting in a town or village, but it had to be kept moving or it would be a target for the artillery. In a certain village fight a machine-gunner kept changing his position. He would fire for a few minutes f

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compared with the