Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was an American-born British inventor best known as the creator of the first automatic machine gun, the Maxim gun. Maxim held patents on numerous mechanical devices such as hair-curling irons, a mousetrap, and steam pumps. Maxim laid claim to inventing the lightbulb.
Maxim c. 1916
Maxim caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1904
The Sir Hiram Maxim Captive Flying Machines operating at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 2006
Gravestone of Sir Hiram Maxim
A machine gun (MG) is a fully automatic, rifled auto-loading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles are typically designed more for firing short bursts rather than continuous firepower and are not considered true machine guns. Submachine guns fire handgun cartridges rather than rifle cartridges, therefore they are not considered machine guns, while automatic firearms of 20 mm (0.79 in) caliber or more are classified as autocannons rather than machine guns.
Top: IWI Negev Bottom: FN MAG (general purpose machine gun)
Czechoslovak 7.62 mm Universal Machine gun Model 1959
A .50 caliber M2 machine gun: John Browning's design has been one of the longest-serving and most successful machine gun designs
A vehicle with a Sumitomo M2 heavy machine gun mounted at the rear
