Popular Science Monthly
��539
��Winchester single shot rifle. Six hundred of these rifles were made by Browning and one of his brothers in the then little fron- tier town of Ogden, Utah, in a little shop, from forgings made for them in the East. Then the patent was bought by the Win- chester Co., and the fame of the Win- chester has since spread over the world.
The older type of Browning machine gun, better known as the Colt, was adopted by this Government in 1890, and has been in use the world over since. The Colt and the Marlin plants turned out this gun by the thousands for the belliger- ents after the war broke out. No Brown- ing gun has ever been discontinued in manufacture — and the record runs back for nearly forty years.
This is the man, who, a worried Con- gressional Committee feared, could not turn out a gun as good as the well known types — merely because it had not been taken over to the torn fields of Europe to prove its worth.
A machine gun, as you know, means in these days a rifle firing the cartridge of the infantry rifles of the army using it, and firing such cartridge at a rate of speed of from four hundred to seven hundred shots a minute by virtue of using either the recoil of the breech parts to work the extracting, cockino; and reloading mech-
���Firing the Benet-Mercier Machine Gun
The cartridges are supplied in flat strips of thirty, which feed across the gun horizontally, the clip being moved one cartridge at a time by the gun's mechanism. The rate of fire is high, about six hundred shots a minute, which means that a full clip races across the breech of the gun in three seconds. Note the flanges on the gun. These cool it like the flanges cast on the barrel of a motor-cycle's engine. The crew must swathe the gun barrel with wet sponges set on wooden handles every three rounds or oftener, which makes a pretty cloud of steam and ad- vertises the whereabouts of the piece in the most disapproved manner
��anism, or else gas taken from a tiny hole up the barrel and working against a piston precisely as gas does in the auto- mobile form of gas engine. It is a gun that works by machinery. The old Gatling was a machine gun, but not an automatic machine gun, because its mov- ing power was a crank in the hands of the firer. All modern machine guns are automatic.
Browning's Three Wonderful New Machine Guns
The first of the recently tested Brown- ing guns, falling in the class of guns to be readily moved about, turned out to be water-cooled and to weigh only twenty- five pounds, which is marvelously light for a gun of this type. It must, however, be fired from a tripod which weighs twenty-five pounds more. The second was a little thing weighing fifteen pounds, the lightest machine gun ever built — more properly an automatic rifle as the modern term is coming to be for the light machine gun. Your father and mine thought nothing of shooting a duck gun weighing thirteen pounds. African hunters use double rifles going fifteen to sixteen pounds.
The water-cooled Browning gun, thus far a military secret and unlike any other Browning gun, is a belt- fed gun like Browning's old Colt. Unlike the Colt it is recoil-operated, (heretofore the recoil had been used only in the Maxim and Vickers), which means a gun in which the power of the recoiling parts is used to compress the springs and extract the cartridge, etc. The ejection is through the bottom of the re- ceiver — toward the ground instead of in the face of some soldier hap- pening to be beside the gun. The entire gun can be dismounted in a moment without tools.
This gun fired twen- ty thousand shots with- out a hitch due to the gun itself, and with but
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