Popular Science Mout/ih/ 



341 



machine gun. It has a wooden stock 

 like an ordinary rifle, and it can be fired 

 from the shoulder, although hardly with 

 automatic fire, because of the unbalancing 

 effect of the series of hard drives of recoil. 

 With the regulating latch set for one-shot 

 fire, the gun fires once for each pull on the 

 trigger, precisely like the well-known so- 

 called auto- 

 matic sporting 

 rifles and shot- 

 guns and pistols 

 which reload 

 themselves by 

 the recoil and 

 fire each time 

 the trigger is 

 pulled. 



When the 

 same latch is 

 thrown down to 

 automatic fire, 

 however, the 

 gun fires at a 

 rate of speed 

 higher than 

 that of any 

 known machine 

 gun, and the 

 twenty shots 

 are fired in 

 approximately 

 two seconds! 

 The Benet- 

 Mercier would 

 take this time 

 or longer; the 

 Colt and Vick- 



ers three seconds. The magazine is 

 readily replaced by a filled one. 



Longer box-magazines — the form in 

 which the cartridges are carried in this 

 arm — can be used, but the twenty-shot 

 is intended for use in the front line, where 

 the firer may have to hug the ground and 

 where a too-long magazine would make 

 the automatic rifle hard to handle. 



Consider the automatic rifle section of 

 a platoon, then, each man carrying easily 

 over his shoulder the lo-pound rifle, and 

 loaded with ammunition packed in spare 

 magazines, and with still more in the 

 hands of ammunition carriers. Using 

 one-shot fire, the firing party can easily 

 empty a rifle with aim for each shot in ten 

 seconds. Then, when the rush comes or 

 when it is necessary hurriedly to sweep a 



The Benet-Mercier Machine Gun 



The Benet-Mercier gun has been used by our army 

 since 1908. It came originally from the French Hotch- 

 kiss factory. It weighed about twenty-eight pounds, 

 which means that it can be picked up and carried by one 

 man in changing position. Benet-Mercier machine 

 guns, however, come as light as fifteen pounds. This 

 gun is operated by the powder gas passing through a 

 tiny port in the bottom of the barrel about half way up. 

 The gas strikes the head of a piston within a regular 

 cylinder like that of a one-cylinder gas engine. The 

 backward drive of this piston performs the various 

 operations of compressing the retractor and main- 

 springs, extracting and ejecting the empty shell, cocking 

 the hammer, etc. Then the compressed springs drive 

 home the bolt, with a fresh cartridge in the chamber 



trench traverse filled with the enemy, a 

 shifting of the latch and a burst of fire of 

 twenty shots in two .seconds! A single 

 bur.st, and a twitch or two of the muzzle, 

 and a traverse would be cleaned out. 

 Such fire would have to be from the prone 

 position or from the hip. No man can 

 stand up under the repeated recoil of a 



light machine 

 gun fired from 

 the shoulder. 



The only 

 competitor 

 the new Brown- 

 ing gun has 

 is the little 

 French Chau- 

 chat "the hell- 

 cat," used now 

 in our army, 

 and weighing 

 nineteen 

 pounds. Our 

 experienced 

 officers say 

 even the twenty- 

 six pound Lewis 

 is too heavy for 

 the automatic 

 rifle work in the 

 front line — and 

 now every pla- 

 toon of an in- 

 fantry regiment 

 has a machine 

 gun or auto- 

 matic rifle sec- 

 tion — the terms 

 being much the same in these days — the 

 men of which carry light machine guns 

 and ammunition, therefore, just as still 

 another section carries only hand gren- 

 ades. Some of the little fifteen pound 

 terrors are now coming through the 

 Winchester works. 



So came about the crowning triumph of 

 the Yankee, John Browning, designer of 

 the Government's automatic pistol, and 

 now the designer of the three most suc- 

 cessful machine guns the world has seen, 

 victors in fair trial over all other machine 

 guns — the Browning water-cooled ma- 

 chine gun, twenty-five pounds in weight, 

 the Browning air-cooled machine gun for 

 planes, still lighter weight, and the mar- 

 vellous Browning automatic rifle or light 

 machine gun, fifteen pounds. 



