better-known models. Unlike Gatling, Gardner had drawn from his military experience and understanding of tactics to canvass the literature and develop practical theories for machine-gun use. In his lecture in London, he laid out proposals for machine gunnery that would in time become standard practice for infantrymen in the field, including using the guns from a distance against an enemy to fix him in place while other soldiers advanced. And he was realistic, avoiding Captain Rogers’s breathless hyperbole and conceding that the problem of unwanted stoppages was critical. Jamming had been attributed in the main to poorly manufactured European cartridges, which were not sturdy enough to withstand the forces of extraction from a gun firing at a high rate of speed, and often were bent or broken in place, stopping firing altogether. But Gardner’s observation was also a veiled attack on his product’s main rival, the Gatling gun, and lingering British concerns about its reliability. “I prefer a pair of walking boots to a balking horse,” he said, “and a club to a machine gun very liable to jam.”59
After his lecture, Gardner faced the doubters. Lieutenant General Charles Pyndar Beauchamp Walker, who had traveled with the crown prince of Prussia during the Franco-Prussian War and assimilated the Prussian assessment of rapid-fire arms, did not contain his contempt. “The introduction of this engine into the French armament was, as I have already expressed myself, a gigantic swindle,” he said. “The results have been in no way commensurate with the expectation formed, and although the weapon is probably capable of improvement and certainly very formidable under certain conditions, I do not think it will ever take the place which its upholders expect.”
The general listed objections, including that the French guns often fell out of use because they malfunctioned. He cannily echoed Gardner’s own statement about a club, to suggest, indirectly but pointedly, that perhaps the infantry would be better armed with blackthorn mallets. “I am reminded of the old Irish saying which I heard a great many years ago, when first in that country, that the ‘shillalah never missed fire,’” he said. “The Irishman prefers a stick to any other weapon; there is no jamming there.”60
Lord Chelmsford, who had led the forces in the Zulu War, and knew something about a machine gun’s value, intervened politely. But as an officer with colonial experience and not a presumed expert in continental warfare like General Walker, he treaded carefully. “I think myself that machine-guns have been rather harshly judged,” he offered. “I cannot help but thinking there is a future for these machine-guns, and I think there is a future for them not as employed with artillery, but as employed with infantry. I can safely say, at all events in such wars as we have to carry on in South Africa, that machine-guns attached to infantry, if they are of simple and reliable nature, carrying the same ammunition as the infantry arm, would be of inestimable value.”61
Gardner, like Gatling, was able to handle rejection. He showed no sign of offense. By this time he had designed multiple models of his machine guns and was breaking into markets. His guns had performed admirably at recent British tests, and one version from his line had been accepted for service in the British navy. An exhibition of them was available in the building. Soon his guns were to go ashore in landing parties in Africa, and meet indigenous charges, too. He opened his reply with polite confidence. “I have only some crude ideas to express, and I express them in a crude way,” he said. “But I believe in what I say.”
Gatling knew about Gardner. In what resembled turf encroachment, Gardner was having his weapons manufactured at a Pratt & Whitney factory in Hartford, not far from the Colt factory where Gatlings were made. And Gardner’s line of guns was enjoying warm press coverage and satisfying reviews in competitive military trials. Gatling had market share to preserve. He wanted to put Gardner and the others in their place. The field was getting ever more crowded. Dr. James H. McLean, a fraud who had passed himself off as an inventor in Saint Louis, was even echoing Gatling’s own theories of world peace through awesome firepower and offering an entire range of quick-firing weapons, with catchy names designed to attract sales: the General Sherman, the Vixen, the Annihilator, and, with a wink, the Lady McLean.62 The Gatling gun risked losing ground. The aging inventor took out newspaper advertisements, calling his would-be rival out.
Many articles have recently appeared in the press, claiming the superior advantages of the Gardner and other machine guns over the Gatling gun.
In order to decide which is the best gun, the undersigned offers to fire his gun (the Gatling) against any other gun, on the following wagers, viz:
First, $500 that the Gatling can fire more shots in a given time, say one minute.
Second, $500 that the Gatling can give more hits on a target, firing, say, one minute—at a range of 800 or 1000 yards.
The winner will contribute the money won to some charitable object.
The time and place to be mutually agreed upon.
The advertisement appeared in 1881. In a similar advertisement published a few weeks later in England, Gatling added a line suggesting the depth of his annoyance. “The trials of the above character,” it read, “will do more to determine the efficiency of the guns than newspaper articles so cleverly written.”64
Twenty years after designing the first Gatling gun, Gatling was white-haired and wealthy, an elder statesman in the machine-gun trade whose name was known round the land. He wanted his life’s most successful work to be above all challengers. It was a sentiment that was unnecessary in the short term, and pointless in the long.
In the short term, the British were still taking his weapon on colonial campaigns, mounting them on the seagoing vessels, boats, outposts, and armored trains. The problems with ammunition used by European forces had been largely solved, and there would be little more talk of jams. The naysayers in officers’ circles could block their armies from purchasing Gatling guns for continental service. But there were other markets—for navies, for police forces, for yachts, for mines, and for penitentiaries—all of which his company would try to tap. And yet his dream of assigning the Gatling to the world’s ground forces was soon to end. Gatling had spent two decades designing and marketing rapid-fire arms. Through official indifference and hostility, and the perplexity of friends, he had set the stage for machine guns. And Hiram Maxim was about to take it.
i The underlined words retain the underlines in Gatling’s handwriting. The [and] replaces an addition sign.
CHAPTER 3
Hiram Maxim Changes War
HIRAM MAXIM WORKED A CARTRIDGE INTO THE ACTION OF HIS prototype gun. It was an unusual-looking device: a narrow and dull metal box with a single protruding rifled barrel. For a trigger it had a small metal bar at the back end of the gun, and on its right side was a lever, resembling a switch, that could be used to adjust the rate of fire. Maxim had obtained the necessary Royal Laboratory machine-gun cartridges, the sort fired by a Gardner gun, and he intended to use them in his creation’s first firing test.
Powerfully built and dark-eyed at forty-four, Maxim had started his career in industry in rural New England. He was a picture of supreme confidence. As a young man he had earned his living as a maker of bedposts, wheelbarrows, wagons, and rakes, and as a decorative carriage painter. But his mind outpaced both the lifestyle and products the local mills offered, and he had become a prolific inventor and successful businessman in the electric and gas industries in New York. A few years earlier he claimed to have beaten Thomas Edison in the race to invent the light bulb, only to have Edison submit the necessary patent papers first. Had Maxim won that race, everything might have been different. He might have remained in the United States and enjoyed a life of fame and wealth, as Edison did. Instead he had moved to Europe, and in a professional lull in London had begun to work on machine guns that would not need a man to do more than depress a trigger to produce continuous fire. His weapon had no hand crank to turn. It did not need one.
He had the six cartridges in place,2 and he gave it a try. In roughly half a second, all of the cartridges were gone. The bullets had been fired in a little more than a blink. This was a new kind of gunfire,
