Machine gun

Machine gun, military small arm capable of rapid fire. After the invention of the percussion cap by Joshua Shaw, the reliability of firing was greatly increased. In 1862, Richard Jordan Gatling invented a single-barreled machine gun with a rotary chamber, it was used in the Civil War. Gatling's multibarreled gun was capable of firing up to 3,000 rounds a minute.

The first fully automatic machine gun was a single-barreled water-cooled weapon patented by Hiram Steven Maxim in 1885. In World War I, the machine gun was responsible for over 80% of all casualties. In 1957, the U.S. Air Force introduced the Vulcan gun, capable of firing up to 7,000 rounds per minute.