Friends went to the "haven of fun";
They bought a potion for the sexton
On a bloody piglet.
And speeches began to boil vividly:
About mitrailleuses, about buckshot, On the horrors of the sedan
The sexton fluttered.
("Soldier's Treasure", Leonid Trefolev, 1871)
The readers of VO mostly liked the materials of the "Poem about" Maxim "series. But many of them expressed a desire to see on the pages of the site a story about the predecessors of the "maxim" - mitraleses or grapeshot. And yes, indeed, because the time when Hiram Maxim designed his famous machine gun can rightfully be called the era of mitraleses, which were used both in field warfare and in the navy. True, they were operated by hand! That is, it is obvious that many truly epoch-making inventions usually had its predecessors, and it was precisely mitralese that was, in a sense, the ancestor of the machine gun, and almost the closest! After all, people tried to learn how to quickly shoot at the enemy for a very long time, and now, not knowing the machine gun, they invented it, and for some time it completely replaced it with them. And now our story will go about mitrailleuse - the predecessor of all modern machine guns.
Mitraleza Gatling, model 1876. Fort Laramie, Wyoming, USA.
"Kropilo", "magpie" and "Pakla's gun"
And it so happened that even at the dawn of the use of firearms, smart people were found among its supporters, who noticed that it was too long and troublesome to charge it! Well, in fact, is it really a matter of pouring gunpowder into the barrel, then inserting a wad there, then a bullet, then pouring gunpowder into the ignition hole again, fanning the burning wick, and then applying it to the fuse. And all this time you, in fact, are completely defenseless, and you can easily be killed, and more than once! Therefore, already during the Hussite Wars and the reign of King Henry VIII in England, the so-called "shooting clubs" appeared in the armies of many countries, which were short barrels, chained together with metal hoops in the amount of 5-6 pieces, fixed on a wooden handle. It was clamped under the arm, and, turning the trunks in turn with one hand, the wick was brought to them with the other, which made it possible to shoot at the enemy with a real “burst”. Well, and then, in order not to reload them, with such a "weapon" they went into hand-to-hand combat, since there was simply nothing to spoil in it from the blows.
Henry VIII even had such a device in his personal use and was called the "sprinkler", with which he used to walk around London in the dark! But the famous conqueror of Siberia, Ermak Timofeevich, was armed with a "forty" - a two-wheeled gun carriage with seven barrels attached to it at once, which also fired in turn. Soon, the imagination of the gunsmiths completely roamed, and 20, 40 and even 60-barreled so-called "organ" cannons were used, which were small-caliber barrels on frames, the firing holes of which had a common chute for the powder mixture. The gunpowder was ignited in it, the fire ran along the chute, ignited the fuses in succession, and the barrels that it connected fired one after the other, and very quickly. But it was already impossible to stop the shooting that had begun, well, and the "organs" were charged for a very long time, and it was very difficult to aim from them.
The Army Museum in Paris even has an artillery piece with nine canals drilled into one barrel. Moreover, the channel that was in the middle had a larger caliber than the eight lateral ones. Apparently, this "miracle cannon" was used like this: at first they fired from it in the same way as from an ordinary gun, but when the enemy was very close, they began to shoot from all these barrels.
Simultaneously with the "organs", the so-called "espignol" was also adopted. In this weapon, there was only one barrel, but the charges in it, when loaded, were located one after the other, and they were set on fire from the muzzle of the barrel with a fuse cord. After that, the shots followed one after the other without stopping. However, such a "unguided weapon" turned out to be quite dangerous, since it was enough for the powder gases from one charge to break through to the other, as its barrel immediately burst. It was necessary to somehow isolate the charges from each other, and this is how systems appeared in which charges and bullets were in a special drum, and were set on fire either with a wick or with an ordinary flintlock.
One of the inventions in this area was made by the English lawyer from London James Puckle, who patented the “Puckle gun” in 1718. It was a barrel set on a tripod with an 11-round barrel-cylinder in the breech. Each new shot was fired by turning the drum, like in a revolver. After the ammunition was used up, the used cylinder was replaced with a new one, which made it possible to fire up to nine rounds per minute. The combat crew consisted of several people, and Pakl intended to use his "gun" on ships to fire at enemy boarding teams.
Puckle's rifle. The drums are shown for both round and square bullets. Illustration from a 1718 patent.
Interestingly, he developed two versions of his weapons: with the usual spherical lead bullets for those years and with cubic bullets, which were believed to cause more injuries, and used exclusively against Muslim enemies (including the Turks). However, Pakl's creation did not impress his contemporaries for some reason.
Mitrailleza is a French word
Meanwhile, already at the beginning of the 19th century, a technical revolution began in Europe, steam-driven machine tools appeared, and the accuracy of the parts made on them increased dramatically. In addition, unitary cartridges were created that combined gunpowder, a primer and a bullet into a single ammunition, and all this together led to the appearance of the mitraillese or grapeshot. This name comes from the French word for grape-shot, although it should be noted that the grape-shot themselves fired not with grape-shot, but with bullets, but this has already happened from the very beginning, since the first mitrailleuse in 1851 was invented by the Belgian manufacturer Joseph Montigny, and France adopted it into service with their army.
Mitralese Montigny. Rice. A. Sheps.
Enviable ingenuity
I must say that Montigny showed great ingenuity, since the weapons he created were distinguished by very good fighting qualities and an original device. So, there were exactly 37 barrels of 13-mm caliber in it, and all of them were loaded simultaneously using a special clip plate with holes for cartridges, in which they were held by the rims. The plate, along with the cartridges, had to be inserted into special grooves behind the barrel, after which, by pressing the lever, they were all simultaneously pushed into the barrels, and the bolt itself was locked tightly at the same time. To start shooting, it was necessary to rotate the handle, installed on the right side, and here it was through a worm gear and lowered the plate that covered the strikers, opposite the cartridge primers. At the same time, the spring-loaded rods hit the strikers, and those, respectively, on the primers, because of which the shots followed one after the other as the plate lowered. This happened because its upper edge had a stepped profile, and the rods jumped out of their nests and hit the strikers in a certain order. At the same time, the faster the handle rotated, the faster the plate went down and, therefore, the faster the shots occurred. An experienced calculation could replace the plate with a new one within five seconds, which made it possible to achieve a rate of fire of 300 rounds per minute. But even a more modest value of 150 shots was an excellent indicator at that time.
Mitralese Montigny. (Army Museum, Paris)
In another version of the mitraillese designed by Verscher de Reffy, the number of barrels was reduced to 25, but its rate of fire did not change.
Mitraleza Reffi Fig. A. Shepsa
The breech of the Reffi mitraillese. (Army Museum, Paris)
Mitrailleza Reffi (Army Museum, Paris)
In Reffi's mitrailleuse, a magazine with cartridges and four guide pins was pressed against the barrel with a screw that rotated with a handle located in the breech of the barrel. Between the capsules of the cartridges there was a plate with shaped holes, which, by rotating the other handle on the right, was shifted horizontally. The strikers hit the holes and hit the primers. This is how the shots took place, and after the magazine was used up, by turning the handle, it was released and replaced with a new one.
Diagram of the Reffi mitraillese device and the cartridge for it (on the right).
Mitraleses were used by the French during the war with Prussia in 1871, but without much success, since the weapon was new, and they simply did not know how to use it correctly.
Cartridge and magazine for Reffi's mitralese.
Mitraleses start and lose
And then it happened that in 1861 a civil war broke out in America between the North and the South, and military inventions from both sides fell, as if from a cornucopia. Everyone knows that during the civil war in the United States, in terms of industrial development, the northerners were ahead of the southerners. Nevertheless, the southerners developed Williams' rapid-fire cannon almost simultaneously with the northerners. And the northerners in return created the "Eger coffee grinder". So here they were almost on a par with each other.
Receiver for "cartridges" and drive handle "Eager coffee grinder"
Designed by Wilson Aiger, this mitrailleza had a simple but highly original design. First of all, it had only one 0.57-inch barrel (i.e. about 15 mm), but it did not have a bolt as such! Each cartridge for it was at the same time a chamber and was nothing more than a steel cylinder, in which there was a paper cartridge with a bullet and gunpowder. In this case, the capsule was screwed into the bottom of this cylinder or, as they say now, the cartridge. It is clear that these cartridges were reusable and could be easily reloaded after firing. When firing, they were poured into a conical bunker, from which, under their own weight, they fell into the tray. By rotating the handle, the cartridges were simply pressed one by one to the rear cut of the barrel, while the drummer was cocked and the shot followed. The empty cartridge was removed, and another cartridge was fed in its place, and so the cycle was repeated over and over again until the hopper was completely empty or the supply was stopped.
So it was the "Eger coffee grinder" that turned out to be the world's first single-barrel cannon that could fire continuously. All previous systems, although they fired in bursts, were multi-barreled devices.
President Lincoln is personally involved in testing the Eger gun. Painting by American artist Don Stivers.
According to legend, the US President Abraham Lincoln called the novelty "coffee grinder", in June 1861 he personally attended its tests, noted the similarity of the Eager gun with a coffee grinder and called it that way. But Aiger himself gave his invention very pretentious names - "army in a box" and "army on six square feet."
Abraham Lincoln was very fond of various technical innovations, and could not restrain his delight from the "machine" he saw. He immediately offered to take it into service. But the generals did not share his impressions. In their opinion, this weapon overheated too quickly when firing, often misfired, but most importantly, the price that the inventor demanded for it, which was $ 1,300 per piece, was clearly overstated.
However, the president nevertheless insisted on ordering at least 10 such grape-casters, and when the price for them was reduced to $ 735, he also insisted on another 50.
Already in early January 1862, the 28th volunteer regiment from Pennsylvania was armed with the first two "Eger guns", and then the 49th, 96th and 56th volunteer regiments of New York. Already on March 29, 1862, near Middleburg, for the first time in the history of war, the crackle of machine-gun bursts was heard on the battlefield. Then the soldiers of the 96th Pennsylvania Regiment successfully repelled the attack of the Confederate cavalry, firing from their "coffee mills". Then the Eger mitraleses were successfully used by the northerners at the Seven Pines (where the southerners first used Williams' cannons), in the battles of Yorktown, Harpers Ferry and Warwick, as well as other places, and the southerners called it "the devil's mill."
However, the spread of this system was hampered by one fatal flaw. The barrel overheated when firing. And all the time I had to remember how to maintain the rate of fire of no more than 100-120 rounds per minute. But in battle, soldiers in the heat of battle often forgot about this and the barrels of their guns were so hot that the bullets in them simply melted. Well, then, after all, one should also watch out which end the cartridges should be thrown into the receiver! So as soon as the Gatling mitrailleus appeared, these weapons were removed from service.
Richard Gatling with his invention.
Then, in 1862, the American Richard Gatling, a physician by profession, designed a mitrailleus with rotating barrels, which he called a "battery cannon." The installation had six 14, 48-mm barrels rotating around a central axis. The drum magazine was at the top. Moreover, the designer constantly improved his mitrailleuse, so that its reliability and rate of fire increased all the time. For example, already in 1876, a five-barreled model of 0.45-inch caliber made it possible to fire at a rate of fire of 700 rounds per minute, and when firing in short bursts, it increased to 1000 rounds per minute, unthinkable at that time. At the same time, the barrels themselves did not overheat at all - after all, no barrel had more than 200 rounds per minute, and besides, when rotating, there was an air flow that just cooled them. So we can say that the Gatling mitrailleuse was the first more or less successful machine gun, despite the fact that it was controlled manually, and not due to some kind of automation!
Gatling mitrailleis device according to the 1862 patent.
As for the Williams grape-shot, it had a caliber of 39, 88-mm and fired 450-gram bullets. The rate of fire was 65 rounds per minute. It turned out to be very heavy and cumbersome, so it never got widespread, but the "gatlings" eventually spread throughout the world and ended up in England and France.
Baranovsky's card holder. Rice. A. Shepsa
The Gatling system was also adopted in Russia, and in the version with fixed barrels, developed by Colonel A. Gorlov and inventor V. Baranovsky, and both models had a rate of fire of up to 300 rounds per minute. They also had a chance to "smell gunpowder" in the battles of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78, and they showed themselves quite well.
The breech of the Gatling mitrailleis. The gates moving along a sinusoid with strikers and extractors are clearly visible.
In the 70s of the 19th century, the Norwegian gunsmith Thornsten Nordenfeld offered his mitrailleuse, and it had a simple design, compactness and high rate of fire, and the cartridges were fed from one common horn-type magazine for all its five fixed barrels. The barrels in it were installed horizontally in one row and fired in turn, and its perfection was such that at some stage it became a serious competitor to the Hiram Maxim machine gun that appeared in 1883.
Glittering brass, massive and even outwardly complex mitrailleuse, of course, made a strong impression on the then military, not like the machine gun of Maxim, who next to her looked completely unpresentable.
Around the same time, American Benjamin Hotchkiss, a native of Watertown, Connecticut, developed another five-barreled 37-mm mitrailleuse, but only with a rotating barrel block. The first "Hotchkiss" - a multi-barreled gun with swivel barrels - is often described as a kind of "gatling", although they differed in design. Hotchkiss himself emigrated to France from the United States, where he created his own production of "revolving guns". Its first cannon was demonstrated in 1873 and performed well, although it fired more slowly than its competitor, the four-barreled Nordenfeld. This mitrailleus with a caliber of one inch (25, 4-mm) could fire 205-gram steel shells and fire up to 216 rounds per minute, while the 37-mm "revolver" Hotchkiss, firing cast-iron shells weighing 450 grams (1 lb) or even heavier cast-iron shells stuffed with explosives, no more than 60, but in reality it was even less. At the same time, it was arranged so that with each turn of the handle there was one shot, and the barrels themselves made five intermittent turns.
Hotchkiss ship cannon. Artillery Museum in St. Petersburg. (Photo by N. Mikhailov)
Here's what is written about her …
A projectile hitting the chamber from a magazine located on top was fired after every third turn, and the cartridge case was ejected between the fourth and fifth. According to the test results, both models were accepted at once, but since the size of the destroyers grew all the time, Hotchkiss eventually bypassed Nordenfeld, and so much so that in 1890 his company went bankrupt! But the five-barreled guns of Hotchkiss, even at the beginning of the 20th century, were still preserved on ships, where they were used to combat enemy high-speed destroyers. But on land, mitrailleses lost to machine guns in all respects, although some of them were in service in the armies of different countries even in 1895!
A slot for installing a magazine. Artillery Museum in St. Petersburg. (Photo by N. Mikhailov)
And shells for it from the Penza Museum of Local Lore …
The cruiser "Atlanta" was one of the first to receive two mitrailleuses as a weapon to fight destroyers.
In the future, the idea of a multi-barreled weapon with a rotating block of barrels was embodied in automatic machine guns and cannons, in which the barrels rotate by the power of an electric motor, which allowed them to achieve simply fantastic results. But this is no longer history, but modernity, so we will not talk about this here. But it is really worth telling about mitrailleuses in literature and in cinema.
Mitraleses in literature and cinema
Indeed, mitrailleses were described in many "novels about Indians", but such a writer as Jules Verne did not pass them by. In his adventure novel Mathias Schandorff, a kind of analogue of Dumas's novel The Count of Monte Cristo, the Electro speedboats owned by Matthias Schandorff contain Gatling mitrailleuses, with the help of which the heroes of the novel disperse the Algerian pirates.
The mitrailleza is on fire!
Well, thanks to the magical art of cinema, today we can see in action not only samples of the most modern revolving cannons, but also medieval organ cannons and later "multi-barrel" Gatling. For example, in the Polish film "Pan Volodyevsky" (1969), in the scene where the Turks storm a Polish fortress, the use of these multi-barreled guns is very clearly shown and it is not surprising that the Poles managed to repulse the assault with their help!
Mitrailleza in the movie "Military Van"
But in the American movie "Military Van" (1967) with two wonderful actors John Wayne and Kirk Douglas in the lead roles, an armored van equipped with a Gatling mitrailleus is shown for transporting gold - a kind of armored cart with a prototype of a machine gun inside a rotating tower!
In another film, which is called: "The Gatling Machine Gun" (1973), also filmed in the genre of Westerns, this "machine gun" helps to disperse a whole tribe of Apaches, whose leader, looking at this weapon in action, is imbued with the consciousness that is against White is useless to fight!
In the funny fantastic comedy film Wild, Wild, West (1999), Gatling mitrailleuses stand both on a steam tank and on a giant walking metal spider - in a word, they are used as widely as possible.
Mitrailleza in the movie "The Last Samurai"
Again, it is with the help of his mitralese in the film "The Last Samurai" (2003) that the attack of the last Japanese rebel samurai is reflected. Well, modern examples of electrically powered gatling can be seen in James Cameron's film Terminator 2 with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role, in which he fires from an M214 Minigun machine gun with a rotating barrel block at police cars that arrived on alarm at the building company "Cyberdine". In the famous "Predator" (1987), Blaine Cooper first walks with the "Minigun", and after his death, Sergeant Mack Ferguson, who, when firing, unloads his entire cartridge pack. But Schwarzenegger, despite his main role, in "Predator" for some reason does not touch him. By the way, the Minigun machine gun used in the films Terminator 2 and Predator has never been an individual small arms weapon. In addition, it is "powered" by electricity and needs a current of up to 400 amperes. Therefore, specially for filming, they made a copy of it, firing only blank cartridges. The power cable was hidden in the actor's leg. At the same time, the actor himself was in a mask and a bulletproof vest so that he would not be accidentally injured by the sleeves flying at high speed, and there was a support behind him so that he would not fall from a strong recoil!
