Rico's friend
Kelley, also a weapons junkie, forwards this
Esquire article by
Ian McCollum:
In 1895, Hiram Maxim responded to the American adoption of the comparatively lightweight Colt M1895 machine gun (aka the Potato Digger, photo above) by developing his own Extra Light version of the Maxim gun. By making his gun air-cooled instead of water-cooled, and making many other parts lighter, he produced a machine gun in .303 caliber that weighed just under thirty pounds. That was a major improvement over the standard Maxim, which often weighed more than a hundred pounds with a mount.
The Extra Light Maxim (photo, above) was intended for cavalry use. But the Maxim company demonstrated it in a rather peculiar way: by devising a two-man, three-wheeled bicycle as an example of a mobile gun platform;
Unfortunately for Maxim, the air cooling didn't work particularly well, and the guns were limited to about four hundred rounds of continuous fire before becoming dangerously hot. As a result, they failed to sell in any quantity, and the dual-gun combat trike also vanished without any sales, and the era of tricycle warfare never quite materialized.
Rico says good old
Hiram; he changed warfare forever... (But tricycle-with-machinegun warfare would have to await the
Nazis and
World War Two, photo, below.)
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