<h2><SPAN name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</SPAN><br/> <span class="subhead"><span class="smcap">Guns that Fire Themselves</span></span></h2>
<p class="drop-cap3"><span class="smcap1">Many</span> years ago a boy tried his hand at
firing a United States Army service
rifle. It was a heavy rifle of the Civil War
period, and the lad did not know just how to
hold it. He let the butt of the gun rest uncertainly
against him, instead of pressing it
firmly to his shoulder, and, in consequence, when
the gun went off he received a powerful kick.</p>
<p>That kick made a deep impression on the
lad, not only on his flesh but on his mind as
well. It gave him a good conception of the
power of a rifle cartridge.</p>
<p>Years afterward, when he had moved to England,
the memory of that kick was still with
him. It was a useless prank of the gun, he
thought, a waste of good energy. Why could
not the energy be put to use? And so he set
himself the task of harnessing the kick of the
gun.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</SPAN></span>
A very busy program he worked out for that
kick to perform. He planned to have the gun
use up its exuberant energy in loading and firing
itself. So he arranged the cartridges on a
belt and fed the belt into the gun. When the
gun was fired, the recoil would unlock the breech,
take out 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 trigger. All this was to be done by the
energy of a single kick, in about one tenth of a
second, and the gun would keep on repeating the
operation as long as the supply of cartridges
was fed to it. The new gun proved so successful
that the inventor was knighted, and became Sir
Hiram Maxim.</p>
<h3>A DOCTOR'S TEN-BARRELED GUN</h3>
<p>But Maxim's was by no means the first machine-gun.
During the Civil War a Chicago
physician brought out a very ingenious ten-barreled
gun, the barrels of which were fired
one after the other by the turning of a hand-<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</SPAN></span>crank.
Although Dr. Gatling was a graduate
of a medical school, he was far 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
into battle it was fired not by soldiers but by a
representative of Dr. Gatling's company, who
went into the army to demonstrate the worth of
the invention. Not until long after was the
Gatling gun officially adopted by our army.
Then it was taken up by many of the European
armies as well.</p>
<p>Although many other machine-guns were invented,
the Gatling was easily the best and most
serviceable, until the Maxim invention made its
appearance, and even then it 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, instead of being a bundle of guns
all bound up into a single machine, Maxim's
was a single-barreled gun and hence was much
lighter and could be handled much more easily.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</SPAN></span></p>
<h3>A GUN AS A GAS-ENGINE</h3>
<p>Another big advance was made by a third
American, Mr. John M. Browning, who is responsible
for the Colt gun. It was not a kick
that set Browning to thinking. He looked upon
a gun as an engine of the same 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 gasolene.
As in the automobile engine, the charge
is fired by a spark; but in the case of the gun
the spark is produced by a blow of the trigger
upon a bit of fulminate of mercury in the end of
the cartridge.</p>
<div id="ip_44" class="figcenter" style="width: 569px;"><SPAN href="images/i_044l.jpg">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_044.jpg" width-obs="569" height-obs="110" class="lborder" alt="" /></SPAN><br/>
<div class="captionl">Courtesy of "Scientific American"</div>
<div class="caption0">The Lewis Gun which produces its own cooling current</div>
</div>
<div id="ip_44b" class="figcenter" style="width: 569px;"><SPAN href="images/i_044bl.jpg">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_044b.jpg" width-obs="569" height-obs="145" class="lborder" alt="" /></SPAN><br/>
<div class="captionl">Courtesy of "Scientific American"</div>
<div class="caption0">The Benèt-Mercié Gun operated by gas</div>
</div>
<p>Explosion is the same thing as burning. The
only way that the explosion of gunpowder differs
from the burning of a stick of wood is that
the latter is very slow, while the former goes
like a flash. In both cases the fuel turns into
great volumes 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</SPAN></span>
of an ounce of smokeless powder is used, but
this builds up so heavy a pressure of gas that
the bullet is sent speeding out of the gun at a
rate of half a mile a second. It travels so fast
that it will plow through four feet of solid wood
before coming to a stop.</p>
<div class="center"><div class="container">
<div id="ip_45" class="figleft" style="width: 348px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_045.jpg" width-obs="348" height-obs="253" alt="" /><br/>
<div class="captionl">(C) Committee on Public Information</div>
<div class="caption0">Browning Machine Rifle, weight only 15 pounds</div>
</div>
<div id="ip_45b" class="figright" style="width: 349px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_045b.jpg" width-obs="349" height-obs="253" alt="" /><br/>
<div class="captionl">(C) Committee on Public Information</div>
<div class="caption0">Browning Machine-Gun, weighing 34½ pounds</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>Now it occurred to Browning that it wouldn't
really be stealing to take a little of that gas-power
and use it to work the mechanism of his
machine-gun. It was ever so little he wanted,
and the bullet would never miss it. The
danger was not that he might take too much.
His problem was to take any power at all without
getting more than his mechanism could
stand. 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 rush
out after it, the pressure in the gun would drop,
and the gas would stop blowing through the
hole. With the bullet traveling at the rate of
about half a mile in a second, imagine how short<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</SPAN></span>
a space of time elapses after it passes the hole
before it emerges from the muzzle, and what a
small amount of gas can pass through the hole
in that brief interval!</p>
<p>The gas that Browning got in this way he
led into a second cylinder, fitted with a piston.
This piston was given a shove, and that gave
a lever a kick which set going the mechanism
that extracted the empty cartridge-case, inserted
a fresh cartridge, and fired it.</p>
<h3>GETTING RID OF HEAT</h3>
<p>The resemblance of a machine-gun to a gasolene-engine
can be demonstrated still further.
One of the most important parts of an automobile
engine is the cooling-system. The gasolene
burning in the cylinders would soon make
them red-hot, were not some means provided
to carry off the heat. The same is true of a
machine-gun. In fact, the heat is one of the
biggest 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</SPAN></span>
the cylinders. All of these schemes are used
in the machine-gun. In Dr. Gatling's gun the
cooling-problem was very simple. As there
were ten barrels, one barrel could be cooling
while the rest were taking their turn in the
firing. In other words, each barrel received
only a tenth of the heat that the whole gun was
producing; and yet Gatling found it advisable
to surround the barrels for about half their
length with a water-jacket.</p>
<p>In the Maxim gun a water-jacket is used that
extends the full length of the barrel, and into
this water-jacket seven and a half pints of water
are poured. Yet in a minute and a half of
steady firing at a moderate rate, or before six
hundred rounds are discharged, the water will
be boiling. After that, with every thousand
rounds of continuous fire a pint and a half of
water will be evaporated. Now the water and
the water-jacket add a great deal of weight to
the gun, and this Browning 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</SPAN></span>
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 machine-guns
of the same class, that the barrel is
sufficiently cooled for ordinary service. Although
a machine-gun may be capable of firing
many hundred shots per minute, it is seldom
that such a rate is kept up very long in battle.
Usually, only a few rounds are fired at a time
and then there is a pause, and there is plenty
of time for the barrel to cool. Once in a while,
however, the gun has to be fired continuously
for several minutes, and then the barrel grows
exceedingly hot.</p>
<h3>EFFECT OF OVERHEATING</h3>
<p>But what if the gun-barrel does become hot?
The real trouble is not that the cartridge will
explode prematurely, but that the barrel will
expand as it grows hot, so that the bullet will
fit too loosely in the bore. Inside the barrel
the bore is rifled; that is, there are spiral
grooves in it which give a twist to the bullet
as it passes through, setting it spinning like a<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</SPAN></span>
top. The spin of the bullet keeps its nose pointing
forward. If it were not for the rifling, the
bullet would tumble over and over, every which
way, and it could not go 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 uncertain. In seven minutes of continuous
firing the barrel had grown so large that
the rifling failed to grip the bullet at all. The
gun was no better than an old-fashioned
smooth-bore. The bullets would not travel
more than three hundred yards. It is because
of this danger of overheating that the Colt and
the Hotchkiss guns are always furnished with a
spare barrel. As soon as a barrel gets hot it is
uncoupled and the spare one is inserted in its
place. Our men are trained to change the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</SPAN></span>
barrel of a colt in the dark in a quarter of a
minute.</p>
<p>But a gun that has to have a spare barrel
and that has to have its barrel changed in the
midst of a hot engagement is not an ideal
weapon, by any means. And this brings us to
still another 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. This
would do away with all the bother of water-jackets.
It would keep the gun light so that
it could be operated by one man, and yet it
would not have to be supplied with a spare
barrel.</p>
<p>Like the Colt and the Hotchkiss, the Lewis
gun takes its power from the gas that comes
through a small port in the barrel, near the
muzzle. In the plate facing page <SPAN href="#Page_44">44</SPAN> the port
may be seen leading into a cylinder that lies
under the barrel. It takes about one ten-thousandth
part of a second for a bullet to
pass out of the barrel after clearing 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</SPAN></span>
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 from a belt or a clip, are
taken from a magazine that is round and flat.
There are forty-seven cartridges in the magazine
and they are arranged like the spokes of a
wheel, but in two layers. As soon as forty-seven
rounds have been fired, the shooting must
stop while a new magazine is inserted. But to
insert it takes only a couple of seconds.</p>
<h3>USING THE BULLET TO FAN THE GUN</h3>
<p>The most ingenious part of the Lewis gun
is the cooling-system. On the barrel of the gun
are sixteen flanges or fins. These, instead of
running around the gun, run lengthwise of the
barrel. They are very light fins, being made
of aluminum, and are surrounded by a casing
of the same metal. The casing is open at
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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</SPAN></span>
in its wake, making a strong current flow
through the sixteen channels formed between
the fins inside the casing. This air flows at the
rate of about seventy miles per hour, which is
enough to carry off all the heat that is generated
by the firing of the cartridges. The gun may
be regulated to fire between 350 and 750 rounds
per minute, and its total weight is only 25½
pounds.</p>
<div id="ip_52" class="figcenter" style="width: 355px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_052.jpg" width-obs="355" height-obs="467" alt="" /><br/>
<div class="caption">Lewis Machine-guns in action at the front</div>
</div>
<p>America can justly claim the honor of inventing
and developing the machine-gun, although
Hiram Maxim did give up his American citizenship
and become a British subject. By the way,
he is not to be confused with his younger
brother, Hudson Maxim, 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 Europe,
and even in Japan. Our own army for a while
used a gun known as the Benèt-Mercié, which
is something like the Hotchkiss. This was invented
by L. V. Benèt, an American, and H. A.
Mercié, a Frenchman, both living in St. Denis,
France.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</SPAN></span></p>
<h3>THE BROWNING MACHINE-GUN</h3>
<p>When we entered the war, it was expected
that we would immediately equip our forces
with the Lewis gun, because the British and the
Belgians had found it an excellent weapon and
also because it was invented by an American
officer, who very 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 it was learned that
there was another gun for which the army was
waiting, which it was said would be the very
best yet. The public was skeptical and finally
a test was arranged in Washington at which the
worth of the new gun was demonstrated.</p>
<div id="ip_53" class="figcenter" style="width: 548px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_053.jpg" width-obs="548" height-obs="288" alt="" /><br/>
<div class="captionl">Courtesy of "Scientific American"</div>
<div class="caption0">An elaborate German Machine-Gun Fort</div>
</div>
<p>It was a new Browning model; or, rather,
there were two distinct models. One of them,
known as the heavy model, weighed only 34½
pounds, this with its water-jacket filled; for it
was a water-cooled gun. Without its charge of
water the machine weighed but 22½ pounds and
could be rated as a very light machine-gun.
However, it was classed as a heavy gun and was<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</SPAN></span>
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 care was exercised to
prevent jamming of cartridges, which was one
of the principal defects in the other types of
machine-guns. In the test this new weapon
fired twenty thousand shots at the rate of six
hundred per minute, with interruptions of only
four and a half seconds, due partly to defective
cartridges.</p>
<p>There was no doubt that the new Browning
was a remarkable weapon. But if that could
be said of the heavy gun, the light gun was a
marvel. It weighed only fifteen pounds and
was light enough to be fired from the shoulder
or from the hip, while the operator was walking
or running. 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 to drop an empty clip out of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</SPAN></span>
the gun and replace it with a fresh one. The
rifle was gas-operated and air-cooled, but no
special cooling-device was supplied because it
would seldom be necessary to fire a shoulder
rifle fast enough and long enough for the barrel
to become overheated.</p>
<p>After the Browning machine-rifle was demonstrated
it was realized that the army had been
perfectly justified in waiting for the new
weapon. Like the heavy Browning, the new
rifle was a very simple mechanism, with few
parts which needed no special tools to take them
apart or reassemble them; a single small wrench
served this purpose. Both the 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.
The advantage of the machine-rifle was that the
operator could fire as he ran, watching where
the bullets struck the ground by noting the dust
they kicked up and in that way correcting his
aim until he was on the target. Very accurate<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</SPAN></span>
shooting was thus made possible, and the machine-rifle
proved invaluable in the closing
months of the war.</p>
<p>Browning is unquestionably the foremost inventor
of firearms in the world. He was born
of Mormon parents, in Ogden, Utah, in 1854,
and his father had a gun shop. As a boy
Browning became familiar with the use of firearms
and 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
the Archduke of Austria and precipitated the
great European war, and it was with the Browning
machine-gun and rifle that our boys swept
the Germans back through the Argonne Forest
and helped to bring the war to a successful
end.</p>
<h3>THE MACHINE-GUN IN SERVICE</h3>
<p>Although the machine-gun has been used ever
since the Civil War, it was not a vital factor in
warfare until the recent great conflict. Army
officials were very slow to take it up, because
they did not understand it. They used to think<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</SPAN></span>
of it as an inferior piece of light artillery, instead
of a superior rifle. The Gatling was so
heavy that it had to be mounted on wheels, and
naturally it 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 <i>mitrailleuse</i>, 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 it did
not have a chance to show its worth. Only on
one or two occasions was it used at close
range, and then it did frightful execution.
However, it was a very unsatisfactory machine,
and kept getting out of order. It earned the
contempt of the Germans, and later when the
Maxim gun was offered to the German Army
they would have none of it. They did not want
to bother with "a toy cannon."</p>
<p>It really was not until the war between Russia
and Japan that military men began to realize
the value of the machine-gun. As the war
went on, both the Russians and the Japanese
bought up all the machine-guns they could secure.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</SPAN></span>
They learned what could be done with
the aid of barbed wire to retard the enemy while
the machine-guns mowed them down as they
were trying to get through.</p>
<p>A man with a machine-gun is worth a hundred
men with rifles; such is the military estimate
of the weapon. The gun fires so fast that
after hitting a man it will hit him again ten
times while 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 swept from side to side so as to cover
as wide a range as possible. It is played upon
the enemy as you would play the hose upon the
lawn, scattering a shower of lead among the
advancing hosts.</p>
<h3>MACHINE-GUN FORTS</h3>
<p>It used to be thought that the Belgian forts of
armored steel and concrete, almost completely
buried in the ground, would hold out against
any artillery. But when the Germans brought
up their great howitzers and hurled undreamed-of
quantities of high explosives on
these forts, they broke and crumbled to pieces.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</SPAN></span>
Then it was predicted that the day of the fort
was over. But the machine-gun developed a
new type of warfare. Instead of great forts,
mounting huge guns, little machine-gun forts
were built, and, they were far more troublesome
than the big fellows.</p>
<p>To the Germans belongs the credit for the new
type of fort, which consisted of a small concrete
structure, hidden from view as far as possible,
but commanding some important part of the
front. "Pill-boxes," the British call 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 utmost
importance; safety depended upon it. Airplanes
were particularly feared, because a machine-gun
emplacement was recognized to be
so important that a whole battery of artillery
would be turned upon a suspected pill-box.</p>
<p>Some of the German machine-gun forts were
very elaborate, consisting of spacious underground
chambers where a large garrison of
gunners could live. These forts were known
as <i>Mebus</i>, a word made from the initials of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</SPAN></span>
"<i>Maschinengewehr Eisen-Bettungs Unterstand</i>,"
meaning a machine-gun iron-bedded
foundation.</p>
<p>It was the machine-gun that was responsible
for the enormous expenditure of ammunition in
the war. Before a body of troops dared to
make a charge, the ground 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 remained to get
the best of them was to crush them down with
tanks. It was really the machine-gun that
drove the armies into trenches and under the
ground.</p>
<div id="ip_60" class="figcenter" style="width: 572px;"><SPAN href="images/i_060l.jpg">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_060.jpg" width-obs="572" height-obs="298" class="lborder" alt="" /></SPAN><br/>
<div class="caption">Comparative diagram of the path of a projectile from the German Super-gun</div>
</div>
<p>But a machine-gun did not have to be housed
in a fort, particularly a light gun of the Lewis
type. To be sure, the Lewis gun is a little
heavy to be used as a rifle, but it could easily
be managed with a rest for the muzzle in the
crotch of a tree, and a strong man could actually
fire the piece from the shoulder. The light 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<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</SPAN></span>
machine-gunner kept changing his position.
He would fire for a few minutes from one building
and then shift over to some other. He did
this no less than six times, never staying more
than five minutes at a time in the same spot.
But each one of the houses was shelled within
fifteen minutes of the time he opened fire from
it, which shows the importance that the Germans
attached to machine-gun fire.</p>
<div class="center"><div class="container">
<div id="ip_61" class="figleft" style="width: 403px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_061.jpg" width-obs="403" height-obs="234" alt="" /><br/>
<div class="captionl">Courtesy of "Scientific American"</div>
<div class="caption0">One of our 16-inch Coast Defence Guns on a
disappearing mount</div>
</div>
<div id="ip_61b" class="figright" style="width: 192px;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_061b.jpg" width-obs="192" height-obs="234" alt="" /><br/>
<div class="caption">Height of gun as compared
with the New York City Hall</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</SPAN></span></p>
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