Читать книгу Inventions of the Great War - A. Russell Bond - Страница 19

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Many years ago a boy tried his hand at firing a United States Army service rifle. It was a heavy rifle of the Civil War period, and the lad did not know just how to hold it. He let the butt of the gun rest uncertainly against him, instead of pressing it firmly to his shoulder, and, in consequence, when the gun went off he received a powerful kick.

That kick made a deep impression on the lad, not only on his flesh but on his mind as well. It gave him a good conception of the power of a rifle cartridge.

Years afterward, when he had moved to England, the memory of that kick was still with him. It was a useless prank of the gun, he thought, a waste of good energy. Why could not the energy be put to use? And so he set himself the task of harnessing the kick of the gun.

A very busy program he worked out for that kick to perform. He planned to have the gun use up its exuberant energy in loading and firing itself. So he arranged the cartridges on a belt and fed the belt into the gun. When the gun was fired, the recoil would unlock the breech, take out the empty case of the cartridge just fired, select a fresh cartridge from the belt, and cock the main spring; then the mechanism would return, throwing the empty cartridge-case out of the gun, pushing the new cartridge into the barrel, closing the breech, and finally pulling the trigger. All this was to be done by the energy of a single kick, in about one tenth of a second, and the gun would keep on repeating the operation as long as the supply of cartridges was fed to it. The new gun proved so successful that the inventor was knighted, and became Sir Hiram Maxim.