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 



