Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was born in America...
Nevertheless, Maxim is mostly remembered as the inventor of the Maxim gun, the first portable, fully automatic machine gun.
Maxim, however, did not invent the very first machine gun as a rapid-fire weapon, which was actually invented by Dr. Richard Gatling in 1861 in the United States. The Gatling gun was hand-cranked device that consisted of six barrels revolving around a central shaft. Although imperfect, it was used in the militaries of the United States and several other countries for many years.
Moreover, the first automatic weapons that made use of the recoil from a fired projectile to reload were invented long before Maxim"s time. In 1854, English engineer Henry Bessemer received a patent for an automatic, breech-loading gun that used steam-power to feed, lock and fire the weapon. The bullet or shell was inserted or loaded at the rear of the barrel, or breech. Nine years after that, a fully automatic machine gun was patented in the United States. But both Bessemer"s
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