Mitrailleuse
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A mitrailleuse is a type of volley gun with barrels of rifle calibre that can fire either all rounds at once or in rapid succession. The earliest true mitrailleuse was theorized and proposed in 1851 b
Reffye mitrailleuse Le Général Hanicque ("Canon à balles modèle 1866"), manufactured in 1867, on display in Les Invalides
The 37-barrel Montigny mitrailleuse, which was developed in 1863.
Rear view of 25-barrel Reffye mitrailleuse; Musée de l'Armée
Reffye mitrailleuse mechanism
Maxim gun
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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.
Mitrailleuse
…to adopt machine guns was the result of wariness occasioned by the failure of the mitrailleuse. There is some evidence for that suggestion, as the Maxim gun had repeatedly been tested by the French armed services ever since its inception. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the French put a much greater…
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