eli5 Why weren’t machine guns possible to make in the past?

Question

What stopped 18-19th century armies with guns from being able to create automatic weapons like AK-47s and Uzis?
Since they don’t use electricity I feel like they’re made with materials and technology that was already available in the 1750s, surely they could’ve put their heads together to create a machine gun and just annihilate any ops…

Thanks

In: Engineering

Answer 1

A key feature of machine guns is they use energy from the previous round to chamber the next one and ready the weapon for firing. This requires both high quality materials and precision machining to work reliably, as well as highly consistent ammunition. The first machine gun was the maxim machine gun which iirc was invented in the 1880s, which basically was as soon as possible once the prerequisites technologies were in wide use.