A machine gun is a fully automatic and rifled firearm designed for sustained direct fire. Automatic firearms of 20 mm caliber or more are usually classified as autocannons rather than machine guns.
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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
The Maxim gun is a recoil-operated machine gun invented in 1884 by Hiram Stevens Maxim. It was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world.
Machine gun
…Navy. These weapons were still powered by hand; however, this changed with Hiram Maxim's idea of harnessing recoil energy to power reloading in his Maxim machine gun. Dr. Gatling also experimented with electric-motor-powered models; as discussed above, this externally powered machine reloading has seen use in modern…
Maxim machine gun at Georgian National Museum.
Air-cooled, Extra Light Maxim M1895.
Illustration of the Maxim Gun in Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1905
A large-bore Maxim on the USS Vixen c. 1898