--- title: "The Maxim Gun: The First True Machine Gun" description: "\"Hardly had 20 men gotten out before one machine gun started clattering, then two, then three. Bullets started smacking the lip of the trench like hailstones, making us pull down our heads. … One man was shot right through the shoulder, squirting so much blood that he was surely to die … Even the stupidest understood that we were going to our deaths, without even the slightest hope of success, simply to serve as living targets for the German machine gunners.\"\n\nThat quote was penned by Corporal Louis Barthas of the French Army while he served in WWI, and it lays bare the brutal reality of being on the receiving end of a machine gun. The exact gun in question would have been the MG08, a German-made variant of the very first machine gun ever made: the Maxim Gun — an invention near unmatched in its foul and loathsome impact upon the world. It has seen countless millions slain directly, and many, MANY millions more slain by its descendants, whether built directly in its image or as spiritual successors to the same base principles.\n\nAnd yet, perhaps because of that, there is something uniquely fascinating about the Maxim Gun. Pondering it for any length of time spawns questions — questions we'll answer here as we dissect both the design and the history of the weapon that changed warfare forever.\n\n## A Long and Difficult History\n\nThe Maxim Gun did not appear out of a technological vacuum. It was the result of a very long process of innovation — one in which mankind desperately yearned for a true machine gun but could never quite manage it.\n\nTake the Gatling Gun, invented by Richard Gatling all the way back in 1861. One of the first successful rapid-firing weapons, it featured multiple barrels arranged in a circle around a central axis, which rotated as an operator turned a hand crank. Each barrel fired, ejected its spent cartridge, and reloaded in succession, allowing a constant, uninterrupted stream of fire — without anyone having to figure out how to cram hundreds of rounds a minute down a single barrel.\n\nTo put that in perspective, the Gatling's \"cyclic\" rate of fire — its rate based solely on mechanical capability — was about 200 to 300 rounds per minute on early models. With six barrels, each barrel was actually only firing between 33 and 50 rounds per minute. That is far less than later true machine guns, and slow enough for the primitive technology of the mid-19th century to handle.\n\nSo if the Gatling could put 200 to 300 rounds a minute downrange, why doesn't it count as a machine gun? For that, here is the definition of what a machine gun ACTUALLY is, according to ARCS — a gold-standard firearms classification system published by Armament Research Services:\n\n> \"A self-loading long gun chambered for a rifle cartridge and primarily intended for automatic fire from a bipod or mount.\"\n\nThe issue is the words \"self-loading.\" A Gatling Gun didn't use the energy of a spent cartridge to load the next round — it was done via a human-powered hand crank. The Gatling was therefore not self-loading, and so was NOT a machine gun. It's pedantic, we know, but when your focus is the first ever machine gun, the little details matter.\n\nThere were others. The Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, invented in 1872 by Benjamin Hotchkiss, looked similar to the Gatling but worked very differently, using a single bolt that fed every barrel as it rotated rather than a separate action per barrel. Typically firing meaty 37mm cannon rounds rather than the smaller .58 calibre of most Gatlings, it had a much slower fire rate of roughly 70 rounds per minute. And like the Gatling, it was hand-cranked — so, not a machine gun.\n\nThen came the Nordenfelt Gun of 1873, an \"organ gun\" with up to 12 separate barrels arranged in a straight row, like the pipes of a church organ (hence the name). Turning a handle loaded rounds into each chamber, fired them one by one in quick succession, and ejected the spent brass. The big 12-barrel models could put out around 600 rounds a minute cyclic, with each barrel managing a pedestrian 50 or so. It fired rounds up to .98 calibre, though a more modest .45 was most common. Clever — but again, hand-operated, and so NOT a machine gun.\n\nIt would be the Maxim Gun that claimed the mantle as the first true machine gun.\n\n## Design History\n\nThe Maxim Gun is named after its inventor, the American-born Hiram Maxim. According to an 1896 article in The Times, its seeds were planted when a friend leaned over and told Maxim that if he wanted to make serious money, he should:\n\n> \"…invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility.\"\n\nWhether that's really what got Maxim's gears turning we'll never know, but we do know that once he was set on the idea — sometime in 1882 or 1883 — he began by studying the fast-firing guns already on offer: the Gatling, the Gardner, and the Hotchkiss. He was not impressed. Multiple barrels, hand operation, gravity-fed magazines — all far too cumbersome and clunky for his tastes. He decided that whatever he built would be handier, more compact, and more efficient, eventually settling on a fully automatic, single-barrelled configuration. The problem? Such a firearm had never been made before.\n\nTinkering with semi-automatic rifles turned out to be the answer, with a view to scaling them up into something meatier and fully automatic. Maxim had previously been a \"bit of everything\" inventor with 84 prior patents to his name — for everything from hair-curling irons to mousetraps. On 26 June 1883 he filed his first firearms-related patent, for a recoil-operated Winchester rifle. (That particular patent falls within a dead zone of late-19th-century British patents that are notoriously hard to access, but Maxim went on a patent-filing bonanza afterward, including a US filing on 9 June 1885 for further developments in recoil-operated rifles.)\n\nIn 1884, with his recoil-operated rifle experiments going well, Maxim established a modest workshop in London and began developing a true fully automatic machine gun. This led to prototype guns — but they were very different from the finalised Maxim. One detail is too strange to skip: the prototypes were vacuum operated. You read that right — vacuum operated. The system used the firing of a round to create a vacuum within a sealed chamber, producing a pressure difference that moved a piston, which cycled the bolt to eject the spent cartridge and load a new one.\n\nMaxim also added an external lever that could adjust the rate of fire from anywhere between two rounds per minute — not 200, just 2 — all the way up to 666 rounds per minute, a figure nothing if not ironic given the demonic impact the weapon would have on the world. Such firepower made cooling a big priority, so Maxim devised a water jacket: fill it with water to absorb the heat building up on the barrel, then swap it out periodically to keep things cool during sustained firing.\n\nBy 1885, the job was a good one — Maxim had made the first ever machine gun. But these were prototypes, and they weren't exactly practical. Mounted on a tripod they were 157cm long, 107cm tall, and weighed 64kg — without ammunition. They were arguably more automatic cannons than machine guns; but since the source for this period, *The Vickers-Maxim Machine Gun* by Martin Pegler, doesn't specify the calibre of the prototypes, we can't say with certainty they reached the 20mm-or-greater threshold that would technically make them cannons.\n\nBig as they were, they impressed. When Maxim showed them at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in April 1885, they went down a storm, and later that year earned him a gold medal at the International Inventions Exhibition.\n\nMaxim still wasn't satisfied. The vacuum system was horrifically unreliable, as was the recoil spring, and the heavy ammunition belts strained the feed mechanism and caused malfunctions. But he was a savvy businessman. He capitalised on the hype by founding the Maxim Gun Company and quickly raised £50,000 — a little over £5,000,000 adjusted for inflation — through share sales. One person bought the lion's share: Albert Vickers, who with his brother Tom co-owned Vickers, Son & Company Ltd, a giant of the British steel industry. Maxim's enterprise was absorbed by Vickers, which would formally become Vickers, Sons & Maxim in 1897.\n\nNone of this changed much for Maxim except how much money he made. He stayed in his workshop, refining what he called the \"Perfect Guns\" — the finalised Maxim. The exact completion date is unclear, but by March 1887 he had three \"Perfect Gun\" prototypes ready: two water-cooled models retaining the earlier water jacket and weighing 27kg, and one air-cooled model at a more modest 18kg. Beneath the very Victorian brass festooning, these were mechanically finalised — the same gun that would eventually be mass-produced.\n\n## How the Maxim Gun Worked\n\nMaxim's original vacuum-tube firing system, innovative as it was, ultimately proved to be junk. So what replaced it? A recoil-operated system.\n\nThis type of system uses the recoil force generated when a round is fired to eject the spent case, chamber a new round, and cock the firing mechanism. In a Maxim specifically, the barrel and breechblock recoil together upon firing, compressing a spring and unlocking the breech. That recoil ejects the spent cartridge while a new round is chambered; the spring then pushes the barrel and breechblock back into position, locking them together and preparing the gun for the next shot.\n\nThis gave the Maxim a rate of fire of roughly 600 rounds per minute — a figure that, with some exceptions, more or less remains the standard machine gun rate of fire to this very day.\n\nTo feed the ammunition-hungry beast, Maxim kept the belt-fed mechanism from his earlier prototypes — another standard that endures across machine guns today. As the gun fired, the recoil moved a feed block that pulled the belt, positioning the next cartridge in line with the chamber. The bolt then pushed the cartridge in for firing while the spent belt exited the gun.\n\nAlthough both air- and water-cooled prototypes existed, the vast majority of Maxim Guns made were water cooled. The water jacket carried about 4 litres of water — adding roughly 4kg of weight when full — and included a steam tube to let off steam produced by the heated water, a handy feature if you'd rather your gun didn't sporadically blow up under steam pressure.\n\nAs for weight, it varied by variant, but for a general figure: call it 27kg for one of Maxim's own guns on a tripod, unloaded, with an empty cooling jacket, and in the low-to-mid 30s for a ready-to-fire example.\n\n## Service History\n\nA lot of militaries adopted the Maxim Gun over the years, so this is necessarily a whistle-stop tour — you could do an entire video on this alone and still not do it justice.\n\nAs far as we currently know, the British Military was first to use the Maxim, ordering six in March 1887 and ordering more in the following years as their use proved satisfactory. And being Victorian Britain, you can probably guess where they were deployed: Africa.\n\nIn 19th-century Africa, their use was absolutely devastating, producing a string of victories that vindicate the grim stereotype of a pith-helmeted Anglo mowing down a sickening number of people with impunity. Consider the 1898 Battle of Atbara, where a mere two Maxims helped the British kill 3,000 Mahdists while suffering only 26 dead. Or the Battle of Omdurman, also in 1898, where the British — this time with six Maxims — killed 12,000 Mahdists while losing only 47 of their own.\n\nThe Maxim's combat debut is murkier. It occurred in 1887 after the famed American explorer Henry Morton Stanley brought one to Africa — how he acquired one at such an early stage remains a mystery. He used it in combat at Mombasa, but against whom, and to what result, also remains unknown. That same gun has a peculiar afterlife: it later fell into the hands of the English explorer Frederick Lugard, who used it in combat in Uganda in 1892 during a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. A contemporary quote captures the situation in Africa more broadly:\n\n> \"All of a sudden I saw bullets begin to rain on the royal hut, making a terrible noise in the copse that surrounded us; it was the Maxim mitrailleuse, which joined its fire to that of boats loaded with soldiers. Just a few canoes, and a crowd of 3,000 or 4,000 throwing themselves in the water to escape the bullets; it was heart-breaking. What shrieks, what a fusillade! What deaths from drowning.\"\n\nBy WWI, basically every major military had adopted the Maxim in one form or another:\n\n- **Britain** had used off-the-shelf Maxims, then adopted a dedicated .303 calibre variant in 1912 — colloquially the \"Vickers Gun\" — which stayed in service until 1968.\n- **Germany** adopted a 7.92x57mm variant in 1901, the MG01, later improved as the MG08 in 1908 (the same gun mentioned at the start). Though increasingly superseded, the MG08 remained in service until 1945.\n- **Austria-Hungary** fielded the Schwarzlose Machine Gun, adopted in 1908, made in a range of calibres, and in service until 1948.\n\nThe full list of adopting nations is far too long to recite — and even a big on-screen list wouldn't be comprehensive, so vast was the Maxim's use. Generally, these powers adopted it in the late 19th or early 20th century, and by the mid-20th century it had largely been replaced by more modern, versatile machine guns. But there is one very notable exception.\n\n## Still Fighting Today\n\nThat exception is the Russian and Soviet variant, the M1910. What makes it buck the trend? It is in service to this very day — and not sitting in a warehouse \"on the books,\" but in frontline combat.\n\nGiven the variant, you can probably guess where: Ukraine. After WWII the Soviets replaced it with more modern machine guns like the RPD, PKM, and RPK, but — always ones to assume the worst and prepare for disaster — they sent some to satellite states and greased up the rest, crated them, and stored them in warehouses across the Soviet Union, just in case WWIII broke out and they got desperate.\n\nUkraine had more than its fair share of those warehouses, which remained largely undisturbed after the wall came down. So when faced with a Russian-backed insurgency in 2014 and a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, those still-serviceable Maxim Guns came out of hibernation to do their part once again.\n\nAnd so the first machine gun ever made — a design pushing nearly 140 years old — soldiers on to this very day, with no sign of quitting, having outlived so many of the younger upstarts that sought to replace it.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Maxim Gun, built by Hiram Maxim in his London workshop, became the first true machine gun in 1885 — the first to be genuinely **self-loading**, using a fired round's energy to cycle the action.\n- Predecessors like the Gatling (1861), Hotchkiss (1872), and Nordenfelt (1873) could fire rapidly but were all hand-cranked, which by the ARCS definition disqualifies them as machine guns.\n- Maxim's earliest prototypes were strangely **vacuum operated** and huge (64kg without ammo); the finalised \"Perfect Guns\" of 1887 switched to a reliable recoil-operated system.\n- The recoil-operated action, water-cooling jacket, belt feed, and ~600 rounds-per-minute rate of fire set standards that endure across machine guns today.\n- In colonial Africa the Maxim was devastating — two guns helped kill 3,000 at Atbara, six killed 12,000 at Omdurman in 1898 — and by WWI nearly every major power fielded a variant (Vickers, MG08, Schwarzlose).\n- The Soviet/Russian M1910 variant is still used in frontline combat in Ukraine, making the Maxim's design nearly 140 years old and still fighting.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What made the Maxim Gun the first \"true\" machine gun?\n\nIt was the first to be self-loading: it used the recoil energy of a fired cartridge to eject the spent case, chamber a new round, and cock the firing mechanism automatically. Earlier rapid-fire weapons like the Gatling and Nordenfelt relied on a human turning a hand crank, which by the ARCS classification means they don't qualify as machine guns.\n\n### Who invented the Maxim Gun and when?\n\nThe American-born inventor Hiram Maxim built it in his London workshop, producing the first working machine gun by 1885. He had filed his first firearms patent — for a recoil-operated Winchester rifle — on 26 June 1883, and had three mechanically finalised \"Perfect Gun\" prototypes ready by March 1887.\n\n### How did the Maxim Gun's cooling system work?\n\nMost Maxims were water cooled, using a jacket around the barrel that held about 4 litres of water — adding roughly 4kg when full — to absorb the heat from sustained firing. It also had a steam tube to vent steam from the heated water, preventing the gun from blowing up under steam pressure.\n\n### How destructive was the Maxim Gun in colonial Africa?\n\nDevastating. At the 1898 Battle of Atbara, just two Maxims helped British forces kill around 3,000 Mahdists while losing only 26 of their own, and at the Battle of Omdurman that same year six Maxims contributed to killing some 12,000 Mahdists against only 47 British dead.\n\n### Which countries adopted Maxim Gun variants?\n\nBritain fielded the .303 \"Vickers Gun\" from 1912 (in service until 1968), Germany used the 7.92mm MG01 and later MG08 (in service until 1945), and Austria-Hungary adopted the Schwarzlose in 1908 (in service until 1948). Many other nations adopted variants too — the full list is too long to be comprehensive.\n\n### Is the Maxim Gun still used in combat today?\n\nYes. The Soviet/Russian M1910 variant remains in frontline use, notably in Ukraine. The Soviets stockpiled greased, crated Maxims in warehouses for a potential future war, and many of those guns were brought back into service after 2014 and again following the 2022 invasion.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original MegaProjects video: The Maxim Gun: The (Terrifying) First Machine Gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ahcYn8LXxw)\n- [Maxim gun — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun)\n- [Hiram Maxim — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Maxim)\n- [Battle of Omdurman — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Omdurman)\n- [Maxim machine gun — Encyclopaedia Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Maxim-machine-gun)\n\n- [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maxim_gun,_Georgian_national_museum.JPG) by Jonathan Cardy / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- [Explosive Reactive Armor: Fighting Explosions with Explosions](/article/explosive-reactive-armor-fighting-explosions-with-explosions)\n\n- [How Close Is Active Camouflage?](/article/how-close-is-active-camouflage)" url: https://megaprojects.pub/article/maxim-gun-first-machine-gun.md canonical: https://megaprojects.pub/article/maxim-gun-first-machine-gun datePublished: 2026-06-09 dateModified: 2026-06-09 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://megaprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: MegaProjects image: "https://media.megaprojects.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,height=338,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/2ahcYn8LXxw/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 5668704ee76cf323d67581514cef6bebb172d1d8088584c951e81047f98bd1e8 tokens: 4704 summaryUrl: https://megaprojects.pub/article/maxim-gun-first-machine-gun.md.summary.md --- "Hardly had 20 men gotten out before one machine gun started clattering, then two, then three. Bullets started smacking the lip of the trench like hailstones, making us pull down our heads. … One man was shot right through the shoulder, squirting so much blood that he was surely to die … Even the stupidest understood that we were going to our deaths, without even the slightest hope of success, simply to serve as living targets for the German machine gunners." That quote was penned by Corporal Louis Barthas of the French Army while he served in WWI, and it lays bare the brutal reality of being on the receiving end of a machine gun. The exact gun in question would have been the MG08, a German-made variant of the very first machine gun ever made: the Maxim Gun — an invention near unmatched in its foul and loathsome impact upon the world. It has seen countless millions slain directly, and many, MANY millions more slain by its descendants, whether built directly in its image or as spiritual successors to the same base principles. And yet, perhaps because of that, there is something uniquely fascinating about the Maxim Gun. Pondering it for any length of time spawns questions — questions we'll answer here as we dissect both the design and the history of the weapon that changed warfare forever. ## A Long and Difficult History The Maxim Gun did not appear out of a technological vacuum. It was the result of a very long process of innovation — one in which mankind desperately yearned for a true machine gun but could never quite manage it. Take the Gatling Gun, invented by Richard Gatling all the way back in 1861. One of the first successful rapid-firing weapons, it featured multiple barrels arranged in a circle around a central axis, which rotated as an operator turned a hand crank. Each barrel fired, ejected its spent cartridge, and reloaded in succession, allowing a constant, uninterrupted stream of fire — without anyone having to figure out how to cram hundreds of rounds a minute down a single barrel. To put that in perspective, the Gatling's "cyclic" rate of fire — its rate based solely on mechanical capability — was about 200 to 300 rounds per minute on early models. With six barrels, each barrel was actually only firing between 33 and 50 rounds per minute. That is far less than later true machine guns, and slow enough for the primitive technology of the mid-19th century to handle. So if the Gatling could put 200 to 300 rounds a minute downrange, why doesn't it count as a machine gun? For that, here is the definition of what a machine gun ACTUALLY is, according to ARCS — a gold-standard firearms classification system published by Armament Research Services: > "A self-loading long gun chambered for a rifle cartridge and primarily intended for automatic fire from a bipod or mount." The issue is the words "self-loading." A Gatling Gun didn't use the energy of a spent cartridge to load the next round — it was done via a human-powered hand crank. The Gatling was therefore not self-loading, and so was NOT a machine gun. It's pedantic, we know, but when your focus is the first ever machine gun, the little details matter. There were others. The Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, invented in 1872 by Benjamin Hotchkiss, looked similar to the Gatling but worked very differently, using a single bolt that fed every barrel as it rotated rather than a separate action per barrel. Typically firing meaty 37mm cannon rounds rather than the smaller .58 calibre of most Gatlings, it had a much slower fire rate of roughly 70 rounds per minute. And like the Gatling, it was hand-cranked — so, not a machine gun. Then came the Nordenfelt Gun of 1873, an "organ gun" with up to 12 separate barrels arranged in a straight row, like the pipes of a church organ (hence the name). Turning a handle loaded rounds into each chamber, fired them one by one in quick succession, and ejected the spent brass. The big 12-barrel models could put out around 600 rounds a minute cyclic, with each barrel managing a pedestrian 50 or so. It fired rounds up to .98 calibre, though a more modest .45 was most common. Clever — but again, hand-operated, and so NOT a machine gun. It would be the Maxim Gun that claimed the mantle as the first true machine gun. ## Design History The Maxim Gun is named after its inventor, the American-born Hiram Maxim. According to an 1896 article in The Times, its seeds were planted when a friend leaned over and told Maxim that if he wanted to make serious money, he should: > "…invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility." Whether that's really what got Maxim's gears turning we'll never know, but we do know that once he was set on the idea — sometime in 1882 or 1883 — he began by studying the fast-firing guns already on offer: the Gatling, the Gardner, and the Hotchkiss. He was not impressed. Multiple barrels, hand operation, gravity-fed magazines — all far too cumbersome and clunky for his tastes. He decided that whatever he built would be handier, more compact, and more efficient, eventually settling on a fully automatic, single-barrelled configuration. The problem? Such a firearm had never been made before. Tinkering with semi-automatic rifles turned out to be the answer, with a view to scaling them up into something meatier and fully automatic. Maxim had previously been a "bit of everything" inventor with 84 prior patents to his name — for everything from hair-curling irons to mousetraps. On 26 June 1883 he filed his first firearms-related patent, for a recoil-operated Winchester rifle. (That particular patent falls within a dead zone of late-19th-century British patents that are notoriously hard to access, but Maxim went on a patent-filing bonanza afterward, including a US filing on 9 June 1885 for further developments in recoil-operated rifles.) In 1884, with his recoil-operated rifle experiments going well, Maxim established a modest workshop in London and began developing a true fully automatic machine gun. This led to prototype guns — but they were very different from the finalised Maxim. One detail is too strange to skip: the prototypes were vacuum operated. You read that right — vacuum operated. The system used the firing of a round to create a vacuum within a sealed chamber, producing a pressure difference that moved a piston, which cycled the bolt to eject the spent cartridge and load a new one. Maxim also added an external lever that could adjust the rate of fire from anywhere between two rounds per minute — not 200, just 2 — all the way up to 666 rounds per minute, a figure nothing if not ironic given the demonic impact the weapon would have on the world. Such firepower made cooling a big priority, so Maxim devised a water jacket: fill it with water to absorb the heat building up on the barrel, then swap it out periodically to keep things cool during sustained firing. By 1885, the job was a good one — Maxim had made the first ever machine gun. But these were prototypes, and they weren't exactly practical. Mounted on a tripod they were 157cm long, 107cm tall, and weighed 64kg — without ammunition. They were arguably more automatic cannons than machine guns; but since the source for this period, *The Vickers-Maxim Machine Gun* by Martin Pegler, doesn't specify the calibre of the prototypes, we can't say with certainty they reached the 20mm-or-greater threshold that would technically make them cannons. Big as they were, they impressed. When Maxim showed them at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in April 1885, they went down a storm, and later that year earned him a gold medal at the International Inventions Exhibition. Maxim still wasn't satisfied. The vacuum system was horrifically unreliable, as was the recoil spring, and the heavy ammunition belts strained the feed mechanism and caused malfunctions. But he was a savvy businessman. He capitalised on the hype by founding the Maxim Gun Company and quickly raised £50,000 — a little over £5,000,000 adjusted for inflation — through share sales. One person bought the lion's share: Albert Vickers, who with his brother Tom co-owned Vickers, Son & Company Ltd, a giant of the British steel industry. Maxim's enterprise was absorbed by Vickers, which would formally become Vickers, Sons & Maxim in 1897. None of this changed much for Maxim except how much money he made. He stayed in his workshop, refining what he called the "Perfect Guns" — the finalised Maxim. The exact completion date is unclear, but by March 1887 he had three "Perfect Gun" prototypes ready: two water-cooled models retaining the earlier water jacket and weighing 27kg, and one air-cooled model at a more modest 18kg. Beneath the very Victorian brass festooning, these were mechanically finalised — the same gun that would eventually be mass-produced. ## How the Maxim Gun Worked Maxim's original vacuum-tube firing system, innovative as it was, ultimately proved to be junk. So what replaced it? A recoil-operated system. This type of system uses the recoil force generated when a round is fired to eject the spent case, chamber a new round, and cock the firing mechanism. In a Maxim specifically, the barrel and breechblock recoil together upon firing, compressing a spring and unlocking the breech. That recoil ejects the spent cartridge while a new round is chambered; the spring then pushes the barrel and breechblock back into position, locking them together and preparing the gun for the next shot. This gave the Maxim a rate of fire of roughly 600 rounds per minute — a figure that, with some exceptions, more or less remains the standard machine gun rate of fire to this very day. To feed the ammunition-hungry beast, Maxim kept the belt-fed mechanism from his earlier prototypes — another standard that endures across machine guns today. As the gun fired, the recoil moved a feed block that pulled the belt, positioning the next cartridge in line with the chamber. The bolt then pushed the cartridge in for firing while the spent belt exited the gun. Although both air- and water-cooled prototypes existed, the vast majority of Maxim Guns made were water cooled. The water jacket carried about 4 litres of water — adding roughly 4kg of weight when full — and included a steam tube to let off steam produced by the heated water, a handy feature if you'd rather your gun didn't sporadically blow up under steam pressure. As for weight, it varied by variant, but for a general figure: call it 27kg for one of Maxim's own guns on a tripod, unloaded, with an empty cooling jacket, and in the low-to-mid 30s for a ready-to-fire example. ## Service History A lot of militaries adopted the Maxim Gun over the years, so this is necessarily a whistle-stop tour — you could do an entire video on this alone and still not do it justice. As far as we currently know, the British Military was first to use the Maxim, ordering six in March 1887 and ordering more in the following years as their use proved satisfactory. And being Victorian Britain, you can probably guess where they were deployed: Africa. In 19th-century Africa, their use was absolutely devastating, producing a string of victories that vindicate the grim stereotype of a pith-helmeted Anglo mowing down a sickening number of people with impunity. Consider the 1898 Battle of Atbara, where a mere two Maxims helped the British kill 3,000 Mahdists while suffering only 26 dead. Or the Battle of Omdurman, also in 1898, where the British — this time with six Maxims — killed 12,000 Mahdists while losing only 47 of their own. The Maxim's combat debut is murkier. It occurred in 1887 after the famed American explorer Henry Morton Stanley brought one to Africa — how he acquired one at such an early stage remains a mystery. He used it in combat at Mombasa, but against whom, and to what result, also remains unknown. That same gun has a peculiar afterlife: it later fell into the hands of the English explorer Frederick Lugard, who used it in combat in Uganda in 1892 during a religious war between Protestants and Catholics. A contemporary quote captures the situation in Africa more broadly: > "All of a sudden I saw bullets begin to rain on the royal hut, making a terrible noise in the copse that surrounded us; it was the Maxim mitrailleuse, which joined its fire to that of boats loaded with soldiers. Just a few canoes, and a crowd of 3,000 or 4,000 throwing themselves in the water to escape the bullets; it was heart-breaking. What shrieks, what a fusillade! What deaths from drowning." By WWI, basically every major military had adopted the Maxim in one form or another: - **Britain** had used off-the-shelf Maxims, then adopted a dedicated .303 calibre variant in 1912 — colloquially the "Vickers Gun" — which stayed in service until 1968. - **Germany** adopted a 7.92x57mm variant in 1901, the MG01, later improved as the MG08 in 1908 (the same gun mentioned at the start). Though increasingly superseded, the MG08 remained in service until 1945. - **Austria-Hungary** fielded the Schwarzlose Machine Gun, adopted in 1908, made in a range of calibres, and in service until 1948. The full list of adopting nations is far too long to recite — and even a big on-screen list wouldn't be comprehensive, so vast was the Maxim's use. Generally, these powers adopted it in the late 19th or early 20th century, and by the mid-20th century it had largely been replaced by more modern, versatile machine guns. But there is one very notable exception. ## Still Fighting Today That exception is the Russian and Soviet variant, the M1910. What makes it buck the trend? It is in service to this very day — and not sitting in a warehouse "on the books," but in frontline combat. Given the variant, you can probably guess where: Ukraine. After WWII the Soviets replaced it with more modern machine guns like the RPD, PKM, and RPK, but — always ones to assume the worst and prepare for disaster — they sent some to satellite states and greased up the rest, crated them, and stored them in warehouses across the Soviet Union, just in case WWIII broke out and they got desperate. Ukraine had more than its fair share of those warehouses, which remained largely undisturbed after the wall came down. So when faced with a Russian-backed insurgency in 2014 and a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, those still-serviceable Maxim Guns came out of hibernation to do their part once again. And so the first machine gun ever made — a design pushing nearly 140 years old — soldiers on to this very day, with no sign of quitting, having outlived so many of the younger upstarts that sought to replace it. ## Key Takeaways - The Maxim Gun, built by Hiram Maxim in his London workshop, became the first true machine gun in 1885 — the first to be genuinely **self-loading**, using a fired round's energy to cycle the action. - Predecessors like the Gatling (1861), Hotchkiss (1872), and Nordenfelt (1873) could fire rapidly but were all hand-cranked, which by the ARCS definition disqualifies them as machine guns. - Maxim's earliest prototypes were strangely **vacuum operated** and huge (64kg without ammo); the finalised "Perfect Guns" of 1887 switched to a reliable recoil-operated system. - The recoil-operated action, water-cooling jacket, belt feed, and ~600 rounds-per-minute rate of fire set standards that endure across machine guns today. - In colonial Africa the Maxim was devastating — two guns helped kill 3,000 at Atbara, six killed 12,000 at Omdurman in 1898 — and by WWI nearly every major power fielded a variant (Vickers, MG08, Schwarzlose). - The Soviet/Russian M1910 variant is still used in frontline combat in Ukraine, making the Maxim's design nearly 140 years old and still fighting. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What made the Maxim Gun the first "true" machine gun? It was the first to be self-loading: it used the recoil energy of a fired cartridge to eject the spent case, chamber a new round, and cock the firing mechanism automatically. Earlier rapid-fire weapons like the Gatling and Nordenfelt relied on a human turning a hand crank, which by the ARCS classification means they don't qualify as machine guns. ### Who invented the Maxim Gun and when? The American-born inventor Hiram Maxim built it in his London workshop, producing the first working machine gun by 1885. He had filed his first firearms patent — for a recoil-operated Winchester rifle — on 26 June 1883, and had three mechanically finalised "Perfect Gun" prototypes ready by March 1887. ### How did the Maxim Gun's cooling system work? Most Maxims were water cooled, using a jacket around the barrel that held about 4 litres of water — adding roughly 4kg when full — to absorb the heat from sustained firing. It also had a steam tube to vent steam from the heated water, preventing the gun from blowing up under steam pressure. ### How destructive was the Maxim Gun in colonial Africa? Devastating. At the 1898 Battle of Atbara, just two Maxims helped British forces kill around 3,000 Mahdists while losing only 26 of their own, and at the Battle of Omdurman that same year six Maxims contributed to killing some 12,000 Mahdists against only 47 British dead. ### Which countries adopted Maxim Gun variants? Britain fielded the .303 "Vickers Gun" from 1912 (in service until 1968), Germany used the 7.92mm MG01 and later MG08 (in service until 1945), and Austria-Hungary adopted the Schwarzlose in 1908 (in service until 1948). Many other nations adopted variants too — the full list is too long to be comprehensive. ### Is the Maxim Gun still used in combat today? Yes. The Soviet/Russian M1910 variant remains in frontline use, notably in Ukraine. The Soviets stockpiled greased, crated Maxims in warehouses for a potential future war, and many of those guns were brought back into service after 2014 and again following the 2022 invasion. ## Sources - [Original MegaProjects video: The Maxim Gun: The (Terrifying) First Machine Gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ahcYn8LXxw) - [Maxim gun — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun) - [Hiram Maxim — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Maxim) - [Battle of Omdurman — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Omdurman) - [Maxim machine gun — Encyclopaedia Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/technology/Maxim-machine-gun) - [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maxim_gun,_Georgian_national_museum.JPG) by Jonathan Cardy / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. ## Related Coverage - [Explosive Reactive Armor: Fighting Explosions with Explosions](/article/explosive-reactive-armor-fighting-explosions-with-explosions) - [How Close Is Active Camouflage?](/article/how-close-is-active-camouflage)