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.
You want to look up the Henry or Spencer repeating rifle. These are the first cartridge fed rifles That saw wide spread use.
the limiting factor is *mass production*. You need to be able to reliably and repeatably produce parts and pieces faster than workers. That also means getting into the bowels of the Industrial Revolution, and that means having power sources that are reliable and extendedable. This starts with water wheels, and then gets into steam power.
Assembly line and interchangeable parts is what made it not possible. Back in the 18th and early 19th this was not around and was just beginning to be a thing in the Industrial Revolution. Machining assembly lines for this like gun parts did’t start until the late 19th century, and interchangeable parts were not common until Henry Ford.
Before 1886 all guns used black powder. Black powder is very very dirty, it will cause guns to jam up after only a dozen rounds or so, making it impossible to use reliably in an automatic gun. People did try, the Maxim gun originally used black powder, but it would always cause jamming issues. After 1886, smokeless powder was invented, smokeless powder is much cleaner and allows guns to shoot much much longer before jamming. Smokeless powder also comes with the added benefit of being much more powerful than black powder. After the invention of smokeless powder, automatic guns actually became possible, and because of that you see their popularity explode from 1890 onwards.
Edit: Just want to add that the first gun to use smokeless powder was the 1886 Lebel. There were other important inventions before then too, like the self contained cartridge and developments in spring manufacturing. Smokeless powder is really the final and most important invention that finally made automatic guns possible.
The 1700s didn’t even have cased cartridges in widespread use. How can you have a machine gun that has to have the powder, wadding, bullet, and cap loaded separately like a musket?
Although you mention AK-47s and Uzis, it should be noted that the Gatling gun was first used during the American Civil War which was the late 19th century.
Although different in functionality, it was a “rapid fire” fairly “automatic” weapon.
Just my view.
Powder fouling and interchangeable parts.
Black powder doesn’t burn away completely when it is fired, and this makes it counterintuitive for high volumes of repeat fire.
Modern firearms use smokeless powder, which doesn’t leave as much residue behind. This allows for more firing before the gun needs to be cleaned.
The other thing is replaceable parts. It’s one thing to build a weapon, it’s another thing to build 100 examples of that weapon which all have similar parts tolerances. Exotic weapons for the rich have existed for centuries- there are plenty of unique firearms in European museums that use uniquely made cartridges, sights, or other useful features that don’t become commonplace on weapons for at least another century or two.
Without replaceable parts, any advanced weapon is unique and only functional as long as someone with enough skill and knowledge to maintain it is present. It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of the tools used to make these sorts of weapons are also one-off items, usually the result of a master craftsman making their own tools. A master craftsman with their workshop full of irreplaceable tools isn’t something that dragged along with your average army supply train or packed into the hold of a warship.
By the end of the 19th century, standards of measurement and gradually increasing access to machine tools was making replaceable parts more and more common.
Black powder machine gun concepts did exist in the latter half of the 19th century, but they were usually multi barrel weapons that were crew served- the sort of weapon that would be used by naval ships in the late 19th century for close combat.
There were early machine guns – the Gatling Gun first saw service in the US Civil War.
Flintlock Muskets we’re designed as muzzle loaders, and as a result could not be fired more than once before reloading.
17th century firearms were poorly standardized, and required that the lead balls be made with an individualized mold. There also were no standard cartridges, each time a gun was fired, powder had to be poured, wadding stuffed in, and then the ball rammed down.
Around the time of the civil war these problems started to be solved – Manufacturing tolerances improved allowing for the mass manufacture of standard sized rifle balls with standardized paper cartridges, and soon enough metal cartridges. By the end of the civil war early “repeating rifles” – bolt and lever action weapons with magazines – were in use.
But fully automatic fire was still problematic. First, because repeatedly firing bullets down a single barrel heated the barrel so much it could fail, and because there was no mechanism to cycle the weapon without an operator providing the power.
The solutions to these two problems in early machine guns were the water jacket and the recoil operated bolt respectively. Water could be easily acquired for cooling and then disposed of when it became too hot and replaced. A recoil operated bolt would use the recoil force of the gun firing a bullet to force the bolt backwards, opening it and allowing the next round to be pulled in to the chamber, loaded and fired.
Modern machine guns require predictable ammunition, the escaping gases are the thing that pushes the bolt back to allow another cartridge to feed. Early gatling guns, which were fielded in the mid 19th century, required a man to crank the thing. Once the ammunition became much more standardized and well manufactured, automatic reloading weapons weren’t far behind. Like, the 45 ACP (automatic) was made to work with the M1911 which uses a short recoil action was also used in the Thompson machine gun which is blowback operated.
So, the TLDR is; the ammunition.
Rapid firing weapons have been a possibility for half a millennia but extremely hard to make happen until the last 150 years.
Only the relatively recent improvements in metal creation and modification have allowed for such weapons to exist in any major capacity and work reliably.
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