World War I History: Vintage Photo

Belgian soldier smokes a cigarette during a fight between Dendermonde and Oudegem Belgium in 1914.

This is a really good photo of a Belgian Maxim, although it appears to be staged – the man has his thumbs on the trigger, but there does is not ammo belt in the gun.

View the Original Photo and Article at Forgotten Weapons

Know Your Weapons: Hiram Maxim Invented More than Machine Guns

Hiram Percy Maxim, son of Hiram Maxim — inventor of the machine gun — is best known for his silencers.

The younger Maxim developed the first viable firearm suppressors at the turn of the 20th century, securing a series of patents between 1909 and 1920. He sold his designs through the Maxim Silent Firearms Company, which would eventually become the Maxim Silencer Company.

Maxim began his work in 1906, experimenting with different designs theoretically capable of moderating sound. He tried valves, vents and bypass devices, and came to believe that the propellant gases leaving a firearm’s muzzle could be whirled to create a vortex, thereby slowing them sufficiently to prevent them making noise as they left the muzzle.

Maxim’s first experimental silencer, pictured at left, used an offset snailshell-shaped chamber and valve to trap and swirl the muzzle gases in an effort to slow their travel. Maxim’s results with this design were encouraging. He continued to develop the idea of swirling the gases and, in June 1908, filed his patent for an “improvement in Silent Firearms.”

Patented in March 1909, this design used a series of curved vanes or blades to create a series of miniature vortices that captured and slowed the muzzle gases.

Maxim did not produce theModel 1909 silencer in great numbers. Its main flaw — the vortices caused the suppressor to quickly heat up. The curved internal vanes also proved expensive to manufacture. Still, the Model 1909 could reduce a .22LR pistol’s report by up to 30 decibels.

In October and November 1908, Maxim filled two more patents to protect an improvement on his earlier design. This new design became the Model 1910, which still relied on Maxim’s gas-vortex theory but simplified the vane arrangement.

Read the Remainder at War is Boring

History of Weapons: Hiram Maxim’s Self-Loading Rifle Came Before his Machine Gun

In 1883 Hiram Maxim designed a unique system that harnessed the recoil of a rifle. Maxim filed a patent for this system which, when the U.S. government granted it in April 1884, became his first firearm design patent — a year before his now-famous machine-gun concept patent.

To prove his ideas about using recoil to operate a firearm, Maxim modified a Winchester 1866 lever action rifle. He removed the rifle’s lever and installed a floating butt plate attached to a spring buffer system that in turn linked to a proprietary trigger guard and operating rod, which then operated the action through a series of jointed levers in the receiver.

 

Maxim explained that he meant for the system to feature in “heavy-loaded rifles such as are used for military purposes” that “rebound with great force and often do injury to the shoulder of the person firing.”

When the rifle fired, it would recoil back into the butt plate, compressing the two springs in the stock that act on the trigger guard, pushing it forward and acting on a lever that then worked the rifle’s bolt. This extracted the spent case and loaded another, readying the rifle to fire again.

Maxim believed that his system would allow rifles to be “fired with great accuracy and rapidity.” In his patent, Maxim also hinted at the possibility of rapid automatic fire, which would become a reality with his later machine-gun designs. If the shooter presses “steadily upon the trigger,” Maxim wrote, “the full contents of the magazine will be rapidly discharged.”

Maxim’s “Mechanism for Operating Gun-locks by Recoil” was little more than a proof-of-concept and the design he included in his patent — although ingenious — was far from practical or ergonomic.

Still, Maxim had high hopes for recoil operation, proclaiming in the patent that the system could “operate equally well on any arm of the kind, or upon a revolver.” This proved to be prophetic, as over the next decade other designers would harness the power of recoil to cycle the actions of both rifles and pistols.

In the meantime Maxim continued work on the design that would soon make him famous — the Maxim machine gun.

This story originally appeared at Historical Firearms.

Read the Story as it Appears Here at War is Boring