|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Machine gun. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us A machine gun is a group or individual small-arms automatic support weapon designed to hit various ground, surface and air targets with bullets. The automaticity of the action, as a rule, is achieved by using the energy of the exhaust gases, sometimes by using the recoil energy of the barrel. In the history of military equipment, one can count several landmark inventions, among which, of course, is the machine gun. Just as the first cannon ushered in the era of firearms, and the first rifle the era of rifled weapons, the creation of the machine gun marked the beginning of the era of rapid-fire automatic weapons. The idea of such a weapon, which would allow the greatest number of bullets to be fired in the shortest period of time, appeared a very long time ago. Already at the beginning of the 1512th century, there were rows of charged barrels strengthened transversely on a log, through the seeds of which a powder track was spilled. When the gunpowder was ignited, a volley was obtained from all the barrels. The use of similar installations (rebodecons) in Spain is reported around XNUMX. Then the idea arose to strengthen individual trunks on a rotating faceted shaft. This weapon was called an "organ", or a canister. The organ could have up to several dozen trunks, each of which was supplied with its own flint lock and trigger mechanism. Such a device operated very simply: when all the barrels were loaded and the locks cocked, the shaft was rotated by means of a handle mounted on its axis. At the same time, the locks, passing by a fixed peg (small rod) mounted on the axis of the gun, descended and fired a shot. The frequency of fire depended on the frequency of rotation. However, such weapons were not widely used. It became more convenient only after the cartridges appeared in a metal sleeve. In the years 1860-1862, the American Gatling created several samples of fairly perfect shotguns, which were the direct predecessors of the machine gun. In 1861, such a canister was adopted by the US Army, and then by many other armies.
Six or ten gun barrels were attached around the central shaft AB, forming with it, as it were, a cylinder; the barrels were recruited in a special iron frame VGDE, which had trunnions Zh and Z for placing the frame on a wheeled carriage. Shaft AB and the trunks surrounding it were passed through the holes of two iron disks K and L. The front end of shaft B was inserted into the front wall of the frame, and the rear end A passed through a hollow cast-iron cylinder M and was connected to the gears HH. Through the handle of the OO, the AB shaft with the barrels was set in rotational motion. To load the canister on the AB shaft, directly behind the cut-offs of the barrels, there was a receiving cylinder P with grooves located on the side surface on the continuation of each barrel: cartridges were placed in them. Above the receiving cylinder, a cover P with a funnel C was attached to the frame on a hinge, through which it was possible to pour cartridges from a special iron pack. The mechanism hidden in cylinder M was arranged in such a way that if one person rotated the barrel system by means of the OO handle, and the other poured cartridges into funnel C, then sequential loading and firing from each barrel was carried out one after the other; while cartridge cases were sequentially ejected from the barrel and fell down. This was done in the following way. Adjacent to the receiving cylinder P was a locking cylinder AB, worn on the same toothed shaft, with grooves that were a continuation of the grooves of the first cylinder. Both cylinders and barrels were one piece and were brought into general rotation by the handle O. A shutter, which was a VG tube, was placed in each groove of the lock cylinder. Inside the tube there was a drummer with a head D and a shock pin E; the drummer could move longitudinally in the bolt, and for the head D a slot was cut along the upper wall of the bolt; a spring was wrapped around the drummer, which was compressed between the head of the drummer and the protrusion in the gate Zh. inclined cut MMM on the inner surface of the fixed shell that covered the mechanism. As a result, the bolts gradually moved into the grooves of the receiving cylinder, pushing the cartridges into the barrels. At each moment of rotation, only one barrel was locked by the bolt, that is, it was prepared for firing. The heads of the drummers D slid along the NN protrusion located on the inner surface of the fixed shell, and as the bolt moved forward, the coil springs were compressed. At that moment, when the bolt locked the barrel, the head of the drummer was released from the HH protrusion and the shock spring ignited the cartridge primer. With further rotation, each shutter, due to the reverse slope of the MMM rifling, moved back, and the extractor pulled out an empty sleeve, which fell down. With a weight of about 250 kg, the shotgun could fire up to 600 rounds per minute. She was a rather capricious weapon, and it was very difficult to handle her. In addition, the rotation of the handle turned out to be a very tedious task. The card case was used in some wars (the US Civil War, the Franco-Prussian and Russian-Turkish), but nowhere could it prove itself on the good side. In the history of technology, it is interesting in that some of its mechanisms were later used by the inventors of machine guns. However, it is still impossible to call a shotgun an automatic weapon in the modern sense of the word. In a real automatic weapon, of course, there could be no question of manually rotating the barrels, and the principle of its operation was completely different. The pressure of the powder gases developed during the shot was used here not only to eject the bullet from the bore, but also to reload. In this case, the following operations were automatically performed: the shutter opened, the spent cartridge case was ejected, the firing pin mainspring was cocked, a new cartridge was inserted into the barrel chamber, after which the shutter closed again. Many inventors in different countries worked on the creation of samples of such weapons in the second half of the XNUMXth century. The English engineer Henry Bessemer managed to create the first working automatic mechanism. In 1854, he designed the first automatic cannon in history. By the force of recoil after the shot, the cartridge case was ejected here, after which a new projectile was automatically sent and the mechanism for the next shot was cocked. To keep the gun from overheating, Bessemer designed a water cooling system. However, his invention was so imperfect that the mass production of this gun was not even discussed. The very first machine gun in history was created by the American inventor Hyrum Maxim. For several years he unsuccessfully worked on the invention of an automatic rifle. In the end, he managed to design all the main components of an automatic weapon, but it turned out to be so bulky that it looked more like a small cannon. The rifle had to be abandoned. Instead, Maxim assembled in 1883 the first working example of his famous machine gun. Shortly thereafter, he moved to England and set up his own workshop here, which later merged with the Nordenfeldt arms factory.
The first machine gun test was carried out at Enfield in 1885. In 1887, Maxim offered the British War Office three different models of his machine gun, which fired about 400 rounds per minute. In subsequent years, he began to receive more and more orders for him. The machine gun was tested in various colonial wars waged by England at that time, and proved to be excellent as a formidable and very effective weapon. England was the first state to adopt a machine gun into service with its army. At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, the Maxim machine gun was already in service with all European and American armies, as well as the armies of China and Japan. In general, he was destined for rare longevity. Constantly being modernized, this reliable and trouble-free vehicle was in service with many armies (including the Soviet one) until the end of World War II. The principle of the "maxim" was as follows. The machine gun had a movable barrel, connected by means of trunnions to two longitudinal plates of a special frame, between which the AB lock was placed, which locked the barrel, the VG bloodworm and the HD connecting rod. All these three parts were interconnected by IOP hinges, with the last hinge passing through the rear end of the frame plates and connected tightly to the connecting rod, that is, in such a way that if this axis turned, then the connecting rod itself turned. On this axis, on the right side outside the box, the EZH handle was mounted, resting with the rear end Zh on the roller Z. The rear end of the spiral spring K, which worked in tension, was attached to the handle using a chain, while its front end was attached to the fixed box of the system. The handle was on the right outer side of the machine gun box. When fired, the powder gases tried to throw the lock back, but since it was connected with the help of a bloodworm and a connecting rod to the frame of the machine gun through the axis D (moreover, the middle axis G was located slightly higher than the two extreme axes D and B, at the same time adjoining from above to a special wall ), then initially these parts (that is, the bloodworm, connecting rod and lock) retained their previous position, which they had before the shot, and moved back, moving the frame behind them, and, consequently, the barrel connected to it. This happened until the EZH handle, sitting on the D axis, fit on the roller Z, after which the handle began to rotate. This rotation of the handle caused the rotation of the D axis, and consequently, the DG connecting rod. At the same time, the lock received an accelerated movement compared to the frame and barrel - it opened the barrel and the sleeve was ejected from the chamber. After that, the stretched spring returned the entire mechanism to its original position.
Since the moving parts in this system were very massive, at first the machine gun often gave a "delay", as a result of which its rate of fire dropped noticeably. To improve the operation of the machine gun, Miller, a technician from the Maxim-Nordenfeldt company, and the Russian captain Zhukov came up with a muzzle. Its action was that the powder gases ejected from the barrel behind the bullet were reflected on the front inner wall of the muzzle and then acted on the front edge of the muzzle, increasing the speed of the barrel throwing away from the frame. The supply of the cartridge into the barrel was carried out as follows. On special cuts on the front plane of the lock, the LM larva slid up and down, the purpose of which was to snatch the cartridges from the tape, and the spent cartridges from the chamber: when it was lifted up, the cartridge head entered into the special grips of the larva, and when the lock was moved back, the cartridge was snatched from the tape. In order to put the snatched cartridge on the line of the axis of the chamber, the larva had to go down, which happened under the action of its own weight, and the special side horns of the larva slid along the side plates of the PR of the fixed box. The SS leaf springs, which pressed on the larva from above, helped to lower the lowering more intensively. The reverse lifting of the larva upwards occurred with the help of lifting levers NO, the front edges of which, when the levers rotated, pressed on the lateral protrusions of the larva. The rotation of the levers was carried out by a special shoulder BB'. The handle in the machine gun acted as an accelerator: having a massiveness, during its rotation, it accelerated the rotation of the bloodworm and connecting rod with the lock being thrown to the rearmost position. Author: Ryzhov K.V.
▪ Plow
Artificial leather for touch emulation
15.04.2024 Petgugu Global cat litter
15.04.2024 The attractiveness of caring men
14.04.2024
▪ Tanker on a leash at the kite ▪ Ultralight Fujitsu Lifebook WU-X/G ▪ Google drones will save animals from extinction ▪ 3-phase 150A EconoPIM 3 module
▪ section of the site Electrician's Handbook. Article selection ▪ article Correspondence of models and chassis of PHILIPS TVs. Directory ▪ article How did Lenin's phrase about the cook and the state really sound? Detailed answer ▪ Allergy article. Health care ▪ article Trinistor regulator. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering ▪ article Four kings and their daughters. Focus Secret
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page