Throughline producer Lawrence Wu tells Cristina Kim all about the maxim gun—the world's first automatic machine gun—and the lengths he took to find out exactly how this 19th century weapon would have ...

Since the introduction of gunpowder to battlefields in the Middle Ages, firearms have been a deciding factor in battles for centuries. However, certain firearm developments shake up the status quo, ...

In 1866, Hiram Maxim, an American engineer, tried out a rifle for the first time and found himself wondering how he could make it better. The result was the Maxim gun – the word’s first ...

Few weapons have defined the tempo of modern warfare quite like the machine gun. It isn’t a new concept by any means, with the notion of rapid fire volleys being something dating back to the Age of ...

Key Point: During just one day in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme the British lost 21,000 men – many of them killed by Spandau machine guns, the German version of the ...

Military thinkers are not always the most forward of thinkers, and this was certainly the case with small arms in the nineteenth century. Initially, the U.S. Army was not sold... During the early ...