Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here today at the Institute of Military Technology
to bring you the cool backstory behind this literally unique machine gun.
So we have two different guys who are both working on
machine guns in the late 1890s, or the 1890s, late 1800s.
We have Hiram Maxim, who's obviously very well known,
we have John Browning, who's even better known.
Well, Hiram Maxim had taken out some pretty wide ranging,
large scale patents. And one of these was in 1894, he patented
basically a gas piston system.
John Browning also started experimenting with semi-automatic firearms.
And in 1892 he got a patent on his first semi-automatic rifle device,
which was a Winchester lever-action rifle
that he had put basically a muzzle cap on.
And the idea was this cap would catch the gas coming out the barrel,
and push forward, and then that was connected via a linkage to the lever of the lever action rifle.
So that when the gas cap went forward it would cycle the action.
Presto, semi-automatic. And it worked, and he patented it.
Well Browning would go on to develop this idea into the 1895 "Potato Digger" machine gun.
Now it's named that because it has this swinging gas lever and
if you mounted it too low, it would dig a hole like it was trying to dig up potatoes.
Well, what Browning had come up with was a gas port in the barrel here, which blows gas downward,
hits this cap, which throws this lever down in this circular arc,
and connects to a rod here, pushes the bolt back and cycles the gun.
Hiram Maxim had a different take, but he had patented the idea of a straight acting gas piston,
which is a little bit different than this but arguably very similar.
Now Maxim and Browning were both interested in getting a contract for machine guns for the US Navy.
And one of the problems for Maxim... You know, Maxim had the Maxim Gun which was
by far the most popular and most effective machine gun available at this time, in the 1890s.
The problem was it was recoil operated. And when he chambered it for the...
US Navy's .236 or 6mm cartridge, it just really didn't work well.
There wasn't enough recoil to properly cycle the gun. Now as he claimed, and he's correct,
he could have gone back and made something work, but the
relatively quick adaptation that he had put together for US Navy trials was totally insufficient.
Browning was also there with a gun like this.
Browning's gun worked better and this kind of pissed off Maxim.
Maxim was kind of an egotistical self-promoting guy, everyone has their flaws, you know.
And he took one look at the Browning gun and declared that Colt shouldn't even be legally allowed to sell these guns.
(By the way, Browning invented it, Colt manufactured it for him.)
Colt shouldn't even be able to sell these things because this is a blatant infringement of Maxim's patent.
Because ... Maxim had patented the gas piston, and according to him all this was was a cheap obfuscation
of that same system by adding a swinging lever instead of a straight lever.
He thought Browning was trying to confuse people and trick the Patent Office when in reality
... in the the letter he published about this, he actually used the word "pirate".
He called the Colt Company and Browning pirates, basically patent trolls. Well the opposite of patent trolls,
patent violators, stealing his ideas and trying to turn them into profit.
Well this gave rise to a bit of a spat between Maxim and the Colt Company, and Colt's response was
kind of to cast aspersions on Maxim's recoil action which prompted Maxim to basically go,
"What, pah, poof." And run off and actually design a Maxim Gun that doesn't have recoiling parts,
that's gas operated instead of being recoil operated.
Interestingly that gun actually ran and it was actually tested at Springfield for military trials in 1899, but it didn't go anywhere.
At the same time Colt's reaction to these patent claims was to basically say that
this gun doesn't even need a gas system, that can't be integral to its operation, because we can build one
that doesn't even have a gas port. And their response was to build this specific gun.
This is an 1895 that operates via a muzzle cap.
So while this has a swinging lever, this is solid. There's actually no gas port drilled in the barrel,
and instead what this does is cycle
(... pull this down so it moves a little freer), this
has a muzzle cap that cycles forward.
It catches the gas coming out the muzzle, that pulls this cap forward,
when that cap goes forward it cycles that lever.
We'll take a closer look, it's hard for me to get the right leverage on it at this angle, but
that was Colt's reaction was to say look we can design this so it doesn't even use a gas ... port.
And if it works without a gas port, how could it possibly be a patent violation? It doesn't even need that technology.
Ultimately at this point Maxim had other things that he had to deal with.
This US Navy contract was kind of a lost cause,
he did kind of have to admit over in the corner that, you know, his gun really didn't work very well in .236.
So, you know, maybe we'll just kind of let this pass, and he did in fact.
Ultimately in the legal system the US Patent Office took the side of Browning.
So Maxim had a fairly large-scale patent, Browning's patent had been on specifically
his ... muzzle gas-operated lever action design. And the the US Patent Office deemed that the 1895
was a legitimate improvement on Browning's existing patent, and thus not a violation of Maxim's patent.
So Browning came out the technical winner in the end. And Browning did go on to sell these guns,
a small number of them to the US Navy, and then a decent number of them to a
whole bunch of different countries during World War One, when everybody needed machine guns.
But of course Maxim just clobbered the market with the Maxim Gun.
So ultimately this Colt potential infringment turned out to be kind of small potatoes.
But what's really cool is we actually have here the specific gun that Colt and Browning made in direct response to this patent claim.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at this and I'll show you exactly how it works.
Alright, so the easiest way to show you this is to look at it from the bottom.
So this is our swinging lever, and you can see that as this swings it's going to run this rod backwards.
There's the full travel.
And if we look at that through the ejection port there, you can see that that
cycles the bolt back, lifts a cartridge up off the elevator,
and then runs the bolt forward. And it does have a tipping bolt to lock. So unlocked, and locked.
Now on a typical 1895 Browning you would have a hole inside there, a gas port tapping into the barrel to ... catch gas,
which would then hit a cup here to actuate this lever. Of course on this one you can see that the barrel is solid,
there's no connection there. And instead we have this muzzle cap.
So I'm going to hold the lever back here so we can show this more easily, but up there
you can see that there are a couple of baffles that are intended to catch and briefly trap muzzle gas.
That's very much actually like the booster assembly on a Maxim Gun.
So we have this pair of intersecting surfaces, so that
(let's see if I can do this, this takes a lot of force, so I'm gonna be able to get it a little ways),
when this comes forward
(there we go),
... these surfaces start to pull the lever down
like that, there we go.
Now the muzzle cap only goes this far forward, so from that point on the lever cycles just from its residual inertia.
And when it comes back around these two intersect again and they kind of do two things.
One thing is that this is going to slow down the lever a bit and buffer its impact on that,
and at the same time the lever is pushing backwards on the muzzle cap to ensure that the muzzle cap reseats
all the way rearward so that it's ready for the next shot.
So I think this is, aside from being really cool history, it's also a really interesting
look at ... the concept of there being two separate parts to a firearms action.
You have the locking system and the operating system.
And the locking system on this modified gun didn't change at all, it's still a tilting bolt.
While the operating system went from being gas operated to muzzle energy operated.
Thank you for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
It's really cool to be able to look at a one-of-a-kind piece like this
that just has such a perfect and clear connection to a specific piece of history,
I really enjoy being able to see guns like that.
And of course if you're interested also take a look at the - it's over there - the Institute of Military Technology
who houses this gun, as well as many others in their extensive reference collection.
They're not a facility open to the general public, but they are available by appointment.
So if you are doing research or otherwise particularly interested, in especially American,
developmental or trials or prototype guns, get in contact with them and check the place out.
Thanks for watching.