The mystery of the vanishing gun inventor (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The mystery of the vanishing gun inventor (2013)

bbc.com

42 pointssmacktoward11 comments

More like 'mysterious vanishing of gun inventor'. Was so excited when I first read the headline.

Do people generally understand that there's almost never a single inventor? That the popularly credited inventor may not be?

There's some air of hidden secret about these articles: Did you know that Edison didn't invent the light bulb! James Watt didn't invent the steam engine! etc etc.

I don't know about you, but I can only invent one thing at a time, and complex systems require a lot of invention. The incandescent light bulb requires electricity, glass, partial vacuum, and very precise tungsten, among many other things.

An efficient steam engine wants high quality steel, tight tolerances, good valves, and no explosions (relief valve, vessel proofing).

A machine gun wants smokeless powder, good belts, many excellent identical bullets with identical powder loads in identical cases with identical primers.

A machine gun needs some way to convert the energy of firing into the cycling of the action to feed and fire the next round.

A machine gun needs to fire when the trigger is pulled, continue firing until the trigger is no longer pulled, and stop firing when the trigger is released.

A machine gun needs a supply chain. It will consume at least 20x more rounds than an individual soldier (30 vs 600 rounds per minute). WWI was an industrial war.

A machine gunner needs a place to stand. A machine gunner wants to be not shot by snipers, not exploded by artillery or hand grenades. A machine gunner will attract attention.

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This merely scratches the surface, of course, but I do wish people had more respect for the complexities of the real world.

Your knowledge of early machine guns needs some work. They weren’t belt fed, but rather spring and crank run, more commonly box magazine fed than belted/linked where the spring mechanism was in the magazine. The early rotory/Gatling style guns were tube fed. Machine guns werent as common during WWI as you may think, and this had nothing to do with “snipers” or obviousness of machine gun placements.

The point that no one man builds everything is fine - except people like Samuel Colt, Eugene Stoner and John Moses Browning were amazing inventors who did single handedly change their industries, and I think fit the definition of “single inventors” even if they weren’t smokeless powder chemists.

> Your knowledge of early machine guns needs some work. They weren’t belt fed...

This is kind of my point. I know there's more to the story than I put in my comment, and you know there's more to the story, but I think that the popular imagination has it that X inventor produced Y invention and that's that.

Speaking of Stoner: here's a video I like about one of his 'failures' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SITipIcMFVU (Small Arms Solutions - AR18/180)

I thought the first firearm generally considered a machine gun (as opposed to human powered Gatling guns) was the Maxim gun, which was belt fed. All the major military powers in WWI other than France and Austria used Maxim guns or derivates of it. Austria used what is essentially a delayed blowback operated Maxim gun, and it was belt fed. Early light machine guns were magazine fed (e.g Bren Gun, BAR, Lewis Gun), but these aren't typically what militaries typically refer to as "machine guns". Some called them automatic rifles to distinguish them from machine guns.

I think Gatling gun and friends are definately considered "early" machine guns, in that they fulfill what is probably the most important distinctive feature of machine guns - relatively sustained periods of high rate of fire.

There are lots of ways to argue about what exactly defines a machine gun, but if we take the perspective of what it's like to be shot at by one, I think we can say that Gatling guns and friends are close enough that I don't really think it matters.

This helps highlight juts HOW MUCH BETTER the Maxim gun was compared to everything before it though.

>Do people generally understand that there's almost never a single inventor?

The best description of this I have heard is Charles Fort's, adapted by the science fiction community into an idea called 'Steam Engine Time'.

>"There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism."

William Gibson, 'The Art of Fiction' - https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/william-gibso...

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>"If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever is supposed to be meant by progress, there is no need in human minds for standards of their own: this is in the sense that no part of a growing plant needs guidance of its own devising, nor special knowledge of its own as to how to become a leaf or a root. It needs no base of its own, because the relative wholeness of the plant is relative baseness to its parts. At the same time, in the midst of this theory of submergence, I do not accept that human minds are absolute nonentities, just as I do not accept that a leaf, or a root, of a plant, though so dependent upon a main body, and so clearly only a part, is absolutely without something of an individualizing touch of its own."

Charles Fort, 'Lo!' Chapter 4 - http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm

http://www.resologist.net/loei.htm

Whoa! Quoting Charles Fort with no mention of raining frogs! :-)

I asked 'Them' and they assure me that the rain of frog will come later, once they have found both the umbrella and the frog.

edit - if you have no idea what I am on about, buy this immediately - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens

Also a theme of James Burke's delightful "Connections" documentary (https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01), which traces how various precursor ideas and technologies came together to create a modern technology.

This is exactly the kind of thing I like. Thank you.

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