The Maxim gun was the first recoil-operated machine gun, invented by the American-born British inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim in 1884. It has been called “the weapon most associated with [British] imperial conquest”.
Hiram S Maxim’s prototype used a fairly complicated mechanism – but he was the first person to use the force of recoil from firing a cartridge to extract the spent cartridge, cock the firing mechanism, load a fresh cartridge and then fire the next cartridge fully automatically. His prototype included a regulator to vary the firing speed from 2-3 per minute to about 600 p/m. His designs matured over the next 2 years to produce a world standard design in 1887.
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