An email question turns into a post.

Sean asks:

Heya-

Been reading your blog for awhile now, and I love your weapon pics. So, I have two weapon questions for you that I haven't been able to find sufficient answers for.

1) The French Mitrailleuse- How did it work? I understand that it was loaded via a plate, and it had numerous barrels, but how did it fire? Some lithos I've seen show a crank in the rear, but ????

2) Cloth/Canvas belt ammo. How'd the feed work, how easy/hard was it to make. Why didn't it come around sooner. (Mind's eye- a belt-fed gatling in
1870)

Alrighty, let's give that a shot.

The Mitrailleuse: loaded by inserting cartridges into holes in a metal plate. Insert plate and lock. You are correct, there was a crank. BTW, mitrailleuse is the generic french word for machine gun - if you want to find out more about the M1870 gun, search for Reffye, the french Colonel who designed it.

The gun "barrel" was a casing for 25 rifle barrels around a common axis, like the Gatling, except the barrels don't rotate. The barrels were held together at intervals by wrought-iron plates. They were open at the breech, and a removable false breech (called a chamber) containing the firing mechanism and loaded cartridges was inserted. The chamber was held in the firing position by a strong screw resembling roughly those of contemporary breech-loading guns like those guns made by Armstrongs. It was a plate with 25 holes, which allowed the points of the strikers to pass through and reach the cartridge primers. The plate was turned by hand so that one striker was admitted at a time. To avoid any deflection of the bullet by the gases at an adjoining muzzle the barrels were fired in a staggered order. Each gun was provided with four chambers, which were loaded by a charger, and fixed to the breech one after the other as quickly as the manipulation of the screw allowed. The rates of fire were slow by our standards. Sustained, 3 chambers, or 75 shots a minute, and for rapid, 5 chambers or 125 shots per minute. Regular rifle bullets were used, but to enhance the case-shot/shrapnel effect a heavy bullet made of three parts, which broke apart when leaving the barrel, was introduced in 1870 at the rate of one round in nine. The weapon was sighted to 3000 meters. The initial velocity was 1558fps; and the weight of the gun about 800lbs, the carriage a little over that, with the total behind the team, fully combat-loaded, about 3000 lbs.

Probably more than you were after, eh?

Belt-feed. There you run into the genius of Hiram Maxim and John Browning. Simply put, somebody had to think of it. But, in order to think of it, you also had to have all the elements in place for it to be successful.

Making the feed mechanism wasn't that hard. Making it all work, was. First and foremost, in a sense, was cartridges. They had to be strong enough to resist crushing in the belt and going through the feed mechanism. That wasn't possible until fully drawn brass cases were perfected. Wrapped brass and paper or copper simply couldn't take the stress. The belt has to grip the cartridge tight enough to hold it, but not so tight that you can't extract the cartridge, or you tear off the base.

The mechanical guns were actually hard enough to fire using muscle power, especially as they fouled from powder residue, without adding the mechanical action of a belt puller and lifting the bullets into the mix. It really took Maxim and Browning's harnessing of recoil, in a straight line aligned with the axis of the barrel, to efficiently produce enough mechanical advantage to make it practical, and useful.

Don't underestimate creative inertia, as well. The Gatling was developed before strong cartridges were developed (the copper cartridges in play at the time were too fragile and short - drawing technology limited how long a case could be) and the initial loads were iron tubes. Subsequent development of the Gatling maintained the same gravity feed system as much because government, in it's normal peacetime penurious fashion, wanted to simply update the existing guns, and not buy a whole new technology.

In the meantime, Maxim, Nordenfeldt, Hotchkiss and Browning were hard at work with their designs, which pretty much obsoleted the Gatling until the high speed electric motors and steel belted links were revived in the form of the M61 guns from GE for aircraft.

The Gatling-style gun was developed into a belt-fed variety for Naval use however, especially by Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss, where weight was not of the same level of consideration, and the guns were intended for defense against the new threats of torpedo boats and destroyers - before turning the barrels skyward for defense against aircraft.

That's my story - and I'm sticking to it - until someone barfs in the comments and quibbles with me... 8^)