John Browning’s first machine gun design was a gas operated system that used a swinging lever instead of a linear piston. He presented the first prototype to Colt in 1890, and it went into production in 1895. The US Navy bought a couple hundred, but the Army opted not to adopt it (much to Colt’s surprise). It was offered for sale internationally, but didn’t become very popular until World War One broke out.
By this time, Colt had improved it a bit with a finned detachable barrel, and they started getting orders for thousands of the guns from Belgium, Russia, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere. Unable to keep up with demand, they licensed the design to the Marlin company. Marlin made a few additional improvements (pistol grip attachment, sights, and access door for clearing malfunctions) and made several thousand for allied nations as well as 2,500 fort he US Army to use as training guns in 1917. They further improved the design by changing it to a linear gas piston, and sold some 38,000 to the US military for aircraft use.
3D animation of the Colt 1895 mechanism from vbbsmyt: https://youtu.be/7j8UQNPlhsY
Marlin 7MG Aircraft Gun: https://youtu.be/pvNhtGOpSZw
I had an interesting epiphany watching this video this morning.
For years, the “Potato Digger” concept and operating mechanism just made me go “WTF was Mr. Browning thinking… That’s just bizarre…”
Then, this morning, I’m sitting here watching Ian’s video with my morning coffee, and it hits me: The “Potato Digger” is a gas-operated, belt-fed… Lever-action rifle.
Hear me out… Take a look at it, from the standpoint of the action: It’s a reversed lever-action, using the propellant gas to drive the lever, which is linked to a bar going back to the action, which is itself entirely in line with a lot of the lever-action rifles that the Browning’s designed for Winchester.
Once you look at it like that, the whole thing makes sense. Lever-action, turned back to front, with return springs and a belt feed. Natural progression, that… Perfect machinegun for Old West cowboys, to be honest.
Yeah. Generally:
Early MGs were designed like industrial tools of the time.
Early semiauto rifles, having to contain weight, were designed like straight pull bolt actions activated by the piston.
This instead is an automated lever action rifle.
Do not forget that already in
The last piece of sentence is useless. Unfortunately I can’t delete it.
You’re on the right track!
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/01/10/10-awesome-firearms-patents/
Interestingly original so-called FLAPPER survived to our times, see 1st photo from top https://www.browning.com/news/articles/historical/restoring-legendary-model-1873.html
Yes, he used the “digger” to convert the gas energy into linear motion. Garand, Kalashnikov, and Stoner all let the gas make that turn on its own, and directly force the operating system back in a linear way.
The latter are effectively gas-actuated pump actions.
More gas actuated straight pull bolt actions. Even if Stoner’s bolt derived from Johnson’s one, that was a short recoil action (the multi-lug bolt, already seen in the short recoil 1908 Carcano semiauto conversion, is useful in short recoil actions because it limits the angle the bolt has to rotate to disengage, and so the rear travel needed for the barrel).
“(…)gas actuated straight pull bolt actions.(…)”
See Mannlicher-Yasnikov http://www.hungariae.com/Mann95Ru.htm for literally straight pull bolt action turned into gas-operated self-loading rifle.
“(…)Stoner(…)”
Whose design also spawned pump action rifle dubbed Sporting Pump AR https://worldoftroy.com/product/rifle-16-sporting-pump-223-std-trigger-troy-stock-optic-ready-blk/
Both Maxim and Browning started out by converting Winchesters to automatic fire. See below.
I don’t know if Ian has a video on it or not, but John Browning did create and patent a semi-automatic version of a lever action rifle. it was basically a flapper over the muzzle that was blown downward like the gas piston and lever on the potato digger. this moved an external rod connected to the original lever mechanism that was modified to operate with this gas operated rod. if I recall correctly he was shooting in some tall grass and noticed that grass was blown around by the muzzle blast and that gave him the idea to harness it. as you said this is basically a full automatic lever action or slide action rifle, Browning just moved that flapper further back on the barrel.
True. To further the experiment, he drilled a half-inch hole through a ten-pound wrought iron “brake block” (the kind used on freight wagons), stuck a Winchester in a vice, set the block on the bench with the hole carefully aligned with the barrel, and fired one .44 WCF round (out the back of the shop across an empty field).
The bullet passed through the hole without touching anything. The muzzle blast blew the ten-pound block off the bench and sent it flying, landing twenty feet in front of the muzzle.
Browning concluded that the force of the excess gas, that was not doing “useful work” in propelling the bullet, was a force that could be harnessed to achieve true automatic action.
Interestingly, at Colt, Browning’s first self-loading pistol design in 1897 was gas-operated, and used the same lever principle as the “Potato Digger” machine gun. Except that the “flapper” was on top instead of underneath.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/john-brownings-gas-toggle-pistol-was-a-fascinating-design-dead-end-9bcd938f8ee3
See also Ezell, Handguns of the World, 1981, Pp. 266-267.
clear ether
eon
good story!
Also Maxim made a lever action semi-auto conversion in 1884, but that was recoil operated.
“(…)thousands of the guns from Belgium, Russia, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere(…)”
While proved to be able to be adopted to various rifle cartridges of that time I wonder if said design could be scaled up like its’ competitors – Hotchkiss and Maxim, which were made in 37 mm https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/98417236162/ordnance-of-the-week-hotchkiss-maxim-37mm
“Linear hammer”… we call those strikers now. 😉
I must beg to differ.
If there is a separate firing pin, which must be struck? Linear hammer. Firing pin is a part of the moving bit? Striker.
Or, so I have always understood it.
Correct. The original Dreyse “needle rifle” was as far as I can determine the very first striker-fired design. And it was originally designed as a muzzle-loader, until Dreyse noticed how much his firing mechanism in a removable cylinder for easy cleaning resembled a common door-bolt.
The Pauly and Roux designs referenced in a previous post all had conventional “swinging” hammers, either internal or external.
After looking at the Chassepot rifle mechanism (and translating the callouts into English), I’m not sure whether it has a striker, a linear hammer moving a separate firing pin, or something in-between.
Linear hammers are actually a fairly rare design path.
cheers
eon
The Chassepot has a striker. The design is not that much diferent from the subsequent rotating bolt actions.
there was a discussion a few years back, when Earl and Denny were still around, trying to imagine the most ridiculous action possible
one suggestion was gas powered toggle
yep, Browning patented that in pistol and machine gun forms, that’s the potato digger.