![]() Maxim made a couple examples of the Prototype gun once he deemed the action reliable and durable, and then proceeded to widely announce his creation in the press, where it receiver much acclaim. Maxim was also the first person to build a water jacket around his gun’s barrel to keep it cool, after noting that water acts as a much better heat sink than steel (which is to say, it takes more thermal energy to raise the temperature of water than it would to raise the same mass of steel by the same number of degrees). Hiram Maxim with his initial 1885 prototype machine gun – note the rate of fire lever. In a somewhat humorous side note, at some of Maxim’s early demonstrations, observers would assume that this handle was used to fire the gun like a Gardner or Gatling and express skepticism that it could be spun by hand at Maxim’s claimed 600 rpm – only to be quite taken aback by the blur of motion when the gun was fired. This was connected to a handle for manual cycling, and when firing this handle would whip back and forth at high speed. The rearward travel of the bolt mechanism was absorbed by connecting it to a rotating bell crank, although early experiments showed that having the crank rotate continuously in one direction caused the system to speed up uncontrollably, so the working version of the gun had a crank which would rotating about 270 degrees with each shot, and then reverse direction. This was done by the lever adjusting the mainspring tension. The very first example gun had a unique trigger mechanism which was actually a swinging lever which would both fire the gun and control the rate of fire – which could be as high as 600 rounds/minute and as low as 1 or 2 rounds/minute. The first Prototype was a clever and creative gun, built with inspiration from Maxim’s own ideas and from existing manually operated guns, most significantly the Gardner (from which Maxim took a variation on the flywheel connected to the bolt mechanism). At this time, Maxim had a workshop at 57D Hatton Garden, London, where he built his guns. On JanuMaxim filed a patent covering 12 different claims relating to automatic firearms, the broadest one literally covering any use of gas pressure being used to operate the mechanism of a gun (he would later spend a lot of time fighting patent infringement claims, not surprisingly). His next step was a gun he called the “Forerunner”, which used a proprietary piston-primer type of ammunition and a hydraulic buffer system – we will also save discussion of that developmental dead end for another day. Maxim began his experiments into self-loading firearms with a patent for converting a Winchester lever action into a self-loading arm, and we will address that particular gun at another time. ![]() Hopefully it will be a good reference for both production history and identification – and it will begin with the first practical machine gun Hiram Maxim made: his “Prototype”. I am going to start an intermittent series of posts on the various different types of Maxim machine guns over the next few months – there are a whole slew of them, and I have good photos of a bunch of different variants.
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