HistoryPhotos

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HistoryPhotos is for photographs (or, if it can be found, film) of the past, recent or distant! Give us a little snapshot of history!

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Photos MUST be at LEAST 10 years old, and ideally over 20. We appreciate that we are living through events which will become history, but this is ultimately not a comm for news or current affairs, but events which have occurred some time in the past.

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141

African-American inventor Eugene Burkins and his machine gun, USA, sometime around or after 1900 (media.piefed.social)

submitted 3 months ago by PugJesus@piefed.social to c/historyphotos@piefed.social

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[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

There's very little information online about this gun or the man behind it. The gun would have been a landmark in devastation being invented (and thus able to be produced at scale) a decade and a half before the biggest application of machine guns, WW1, so it's curious that there is no caliber or use case stated for the gun.

The seeming only article about this mentioned it was based on naval cannon, which would put this into a maritime/autocannon role and up against the well established Maxim pom pom. Mr Burkin's gun had the bad fortune to enter navies during the drastic shift away from smaller caliber cannon to Dreadnaught style long range large caliber weapons.