Machine gun "Maxim", American, English and Russian

In the finale of the classic Soviet film "Chapayev" the main character takes his last fight in the attic of the White House surrounded by a mansion. The besiegers adjust the armored car with machine-gun turrets and squat on all sides. There is a ringing of broken glass, and from the window of the mezzanine appears a blunt sting, belching deadly fire.

Here Vasily Ivanovich sails, embarrassingly zagrebyaya the only surviving hand, and from the shore it shoots Cossacks, queues, heaped and ultimately accurate. Combining all these scenes is the fact that both warring parties use the same type of quick - fire automatic weapon - the Maxim machine gun.

Soviet people were convinced that it had an exclusively domestic origin, even its name sounds like a simple Russian name. Again, I remember another movie, "Maxim's Youth". True, and the famous Parisian restaurant is also so named. "Is it not in honor of the machine gun?" - the proletarian wonders.

Everything is a little more complicated. Machine gun "Maxim" (with emphasis on the first syllable) was named after its inventor, American Hayram Stevens Maxim. In 1883, he offered his offspring to the US Army, but was refused. A peaceful agricultural-industrial country, separated from Europe by the ocean, did not require such monstrous weapons of mass destruction.

Another thing is Britain with all its colonies, behind which the eye and the eye ... Here they listened very carefully to the engineer-inventor and expressed the desire to formalize the state order. Together with the Vikers brothers (sons), Hyrym Stevens registered an enterprise whose main product was the Maxim machine gun, which was very useful in the Anglo-Boer War.

The supply for export also began. Technical specifications of the new sample were unique at that time. The lethal force remained at a kilometer distance, the rate of fire is the same as that of the modern "Kalashnikov" - 10 rounds per second.

The machine gun "Maxim" was simple and reliable. To move the cartridge belt and cocking the shutter, recoil energy was used, and the cooling of the barrel was carried out with water, which should be filled in a cylindrical casing. The calculation was protected from enemy fire by an armored rifle of rational form. All parts were unified in order to facilitate repairs in the field. Moving heavy weapons was facilitated by the wheeled or sleigh chassis on which the bed was mounted.

Such qualities were always inherent in Russian weapons, so the machine gun Maxim immediately after receiving the first samples in the imperial army (1900-th year) earned the soldiers' respect. He costed a lot, 500 rubles, and in order to reduce military spending, in 1910, his manufacturing under license began in Russia.

The changes that the prototype had suffered related to the possibility of using not only water, but also snow to cool, for this purpose the neck of the casing was expanded. To avoid dependence in the import of ammunition, the caliber of the Russian "Maxim" in Tula was remade under a standard three-line cartridge.

Like many masterpieces of weapons art, this machine gun was much ahead of its time. The Red Army and the Navy widely used the machine gun "Maxim" during the Great Patriotic War. Ship's anti-aircraft installations, consisting of quadruple barrels with a synchronized trigger, showed their effectiveness in the fight against German ground attack aircraft, and the infantry skillfully used this proven firepower in defense and offensive operations until 1944, when more sophisticated designs appeared.