The presentation brought him financial backing, and Gatling enlisted Miles H. Greenwood and Co. to produce six prototype guns at its Eagle Iron Works factory in Cincinnati.


The day after he paid Greenwood $6,000 for the guns, however, the factory burned to the ground, melting his prototypes into lumps of brass and destroying all his plans. Undaunted, Gatling came up with an even better design that used rimfire ammunition and soon had 12 more prototypes under construction. Union Gen. Benjamin F. Butler was so impressed with the guns he bought them with his own funds and used them in the siege of Petersburg, Va., from 1864-1865.


Going international
Gatling’s formidable invention had drawn first blood, but although he continued to refine his weapon until his death in February 1903, it never became the deterrent he had envisioned. Instead, by the time World War I began in the summer of 1914, the machine gun had come to dominate the battlefield on both sides of the conflict. That was largely due to the efforts of Sir Hiram Maxim, an American inventor who moved to London in the late 1800s.


Maxim developed a new type of machine gun that used the gas produced by the explosion of powder in the chambers to power the gun’s mechanism, eliminating the need for external power. His single-barrel gun was capable of firing an astounding 666 rounds a minute and earned Maxim a knighthood in 1901. By the start of World War I, Maxim’s gun was in use in every major country’s army.


John Moses Browning, an American gunsmith, further improved on the machine gun by using a piston system to drive his .30-caliber weapon’s firing mechanisms.


APRIL 2012 MILITARY OFFICER 63

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