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
There were several extremely important innovations in chemistry that hadn’t happened yet.
In the 1750’s the gun powder was ignited by a piece of flint hitting a metal pan.
In the early 1800s the percussion cap was invented. Now the hammer of a gun hits a bit of sensitive chemicals and those chemicals explode igniting the gun powder.
Within a couple decades, the self contained cartridge had been invented. It was a bullet, gun powder and a percussion cap all wrapped up in paper. You would place the cartridge in the rifle, and when you fired, a needle would pierce through the paper and hit the percussion cap.
The next innovation was metallic cartridges. These were significantly stronger than paper cartridges and you could do things like cram a bunch of them in a magazine without them breaking or deforming like paper would.
Not long after metallic cartridges were invented, the early proto-machine guns started being built. None of them were really practical though because the ammo they were using produced a ton of soot. They would quickly get all gunked up and stop working reliably until you cleaned them.
Once “smokeless” powder was invented, they could fire for far longer without the system getting too dirty. Smokeless powder was invented in 1884, and by 1886 the first Maxim guns were being adopted by the British Army.
From then on, it was just an iterative process of figuring out how to make things smaller and lighter (while still remaining strong) until they were small enough for soldiers to run around with them.
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