What's shooting? What? What's What's what's shooting? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we ask what is shooting? UM? Here with us today to answer that question. Carl Casarda of Range TV. Carl, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Do you do you like my NPR voice? I did at the at the end they're kind of trying to professionalize it a little bit. Yeah, I know. It really takes this topic and makes it feel very you know, astute and erudite. So I'm excited about this. And Carl, you are, like me, very interested in firearms. You are are professionally interested in firearms, unlike me because I'm just I'm just a little bit of a hack and a fraud. Um. And for Enranged TV, you do all sorts of videos on on different kinds of weapons. Historic. You've got a room full of historic guns that I'm looking at right. I'm extremely jealous of your collection. It looks it looks wonderful. UM. Carl, how are you, How are you? How are you feeling today? Feeling pretty good? Today is a pretty good day. You know, today is actually the day we're recording this is uh Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles, California, and he, of course is the prototype for the thin blue line police brutality we have today. So hooray, Yeah, good for that. And uh, today we're not gonna be talking thin blue lines stuff today, um, although you know there might be a couple of shades of that, but we are going to be talking about, Um, we're gonna be talking about some gun related bastards, which I thought I would have you on for um. And the first bastard we're going to talk about is a little fellow you may have heard of called Hiram Maxim. Now what do you know about Mr Maxim? I know that he had designed the belt fed water cooled machine gun that every side of World War One used to mow each other's children down. Yeah, he is why Europe is no longer the economic center of the world, and a lot of way there were other factors, but but Mr Maxim played a role in that for sure. Um. Now, obviously, uh, both of us are are very much into firearms as a hobby. UM. I don't consider someone a bastard just because they make a gun or really necessarily another kind of weapons system. I do think there are certain weapons systems like cluster bombs that you kind of have to be a piece of ship to decide. UM. But as a general rule, a gun as a tool, and and there's nothing inherently a moral about designing a tool. UM. That said, it's probably fair to note that within the industry of people who design things for the purpose of killing, there's probably a higher proportion of bastards than in a lot of fields of industrial design. UM. And we are going to talk today about two of the greatest gun makers in human history. This week about two of the greatest gunmakers in human history. Both of them were not very pleasant people. UM. And, as I just stated here, UM Steven's maxim is our subject today now here. UM was were in on February five, eighteen forty and Singersville, Maine. He wrote a biography later in life, the bulk of which is a mix of lies and angry rants about people he'd argued with. Like It's it's essentially at the very end of his life, he drops, like the old timy equivalent of a mixtape, yelling at all of the people who he had had fights with over the course of his career in the gun industry, and a lot of it's like very technical stuff that I can't you know, I can't tell you who actually invented the lightbulb, for example, which is a major thing in his Did you actually know much about Maxim the in his career before making the machine gun? Honestly, no, I don't. I mean, I'm very familiar with the gun obviously, or the machine gun and how it revolutionized and changed warfare, But as for the individual himself, no, I'm not not really familiar with his life. Well, he was a really interesting guy. He's one of these dudes that is just a compulsive inventor. Um, Like one of those people who and it's this this fascinating period the eighteen hundreds, is this moment where it's also really easy to be an inventor because like industrial like tooling and machining and whatnot has hit this this level of professionalization and suddenly all sorts of things are possible. And if you're into inventing, there's a lot there's a number of dudes like Maxim who just over the course of their life invent like sixty things that everybody uses today. Um. And it's Maxim is one of those people. Um, and he's he's he's a particularly interesting example on it. Now. In his biography, which is again not a super reliable text, he provides some thoughts on his family background that I find interesting, and I'm gonna read a paragraph from that now. This is him describing his ancestors. The ancestors of the Maximum family with French Huguenots. They were driven out of France and settled in Canterbury, England, from which place they immigrated to Plymouth County, Massachusetts, where quote, they could worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience and prevent others from doing the same. Prevent others from doing the same. That's very fun. Now, that's that's fun. I'm gonna find my freedom so I can use it as a wrench against others. Such a trend. Yeah, and Maximum is being pretty self aware here. He is not that kind. He's not a particularly religious man ever. Um. He famously is more or less an atheist until he goes to Russia to sell the machine guns, and they won't let him talk to the czar unless he has a religion. So he's like, I guess I'm Protestant. Better pick the right one. Yeah, they didn't care. You just couldn't be a pagan walking up to the czar, I guess, um, so uh yeah. Most of the sourciers you'll find will note that his father was a sheep farmer and very poor. This is technically accurate, but I think it's accurate in a way that gives readers an incorrect idea about here UM's upbringing. Within his autobiography, he describes his family as being comparatively well off. They just didn't have any money because no one really had money at the time and place where he lived, right, Like, they're not poor. Money is not a meaningful fact of life for people living in the wilderness of Maine in the eighteen forties. Like, you don't do a lot of spending and stuff. Right. They live in this kind of like community that's pretty spread out and sprawling. Um, they were very self sufficient. They bartered and traded with the people in their community for the things they couldn't produce on their own. Like, they were the kind of people who maybe a couple of times a year they would go into a bigger town and sell some products and use them to buy a thing or two and they would have money for that kind of brief period of time, but like money is not They're not poor, they just don't have money. Does that like make sense that kind of person. We don't really have those people anymore. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm sure there are some places in the world that have some subsistence like that. But the reality is, if you're self sufficient, you don't really need an Amazon Prime account at that point. But you just you just do your thing. You go out and get your milk, you harvest your your your beef from your cows or whatever, and you're good to go. That makes sense. Yeah, So a lot of kind of popular sources on it will say that he grew up poor. He doesn't seem to have considered himself poor. He's like, well, we had everything we needed. We just like, why would we have needed money at that point? Um So, Yeah, at no point in his childhood does Here seemed to have considered himself poor. And their community was close to a group of Indigenous Americans living in a small village nearby. Um Here's autobiography is filled with the same kind of casual racism you would expect from a book written by a man who grew up in the eighteen forties. But it's also not he's not like hateful in it. Um. And in fact, there's a number of times where he will note stuff that, like the way that the natives had positioned their village was a lot smarter than how the white people had put their houses because it was more protected from rain and it got better sunlight. Um. So he was he was somebody who was definitely possessed of the bigotry of his time, um, but was also capable of like looking at what these people were doing and recognizing that they understood the the environment better and we're making smarter choices about it, which he appreciated because he's got this kind of mechanical mind right, Like he's somebody who thinks a lot about efficiency, and he notes that their lives are a lot more efficient than ours because they understand the area better. Um. There's a point in his childhood where like he and his father take advice from a local chief they're friendly with on how to trap and prepare different animals. More than anything, they hunted black bear, which a lot of his early memories are like hunting black bear with his dad. Um, and their community was the kind of place that. There's a story he tells where he and his dad are out in the field and they see a black bear, so they run back to their house for a gun, only to find that one of their neighbors had spotted the bear, gone into their house, grabbed their rifle and taking it out to go shoot the bear. So it's like that kind of of community, you know. Um, not only do people not lock their doors, people feel fine grabbing like their their their neighbor's gun to go shoot a bear if they see one. Um, which is also not a very common thing today. I don't think I've lived out in the in the sticks a lot of my life, but I have not had that kind of relationship with my neighbors. Yeah, I live in a rural area as well, and I don't have that relationship either. But at the same time, we live in a world saturated with with the idea that we know we technically in theory quote unquote know so many people that we really don't. But I think it's changed the nature of people live. Yeah, they definitely. Reading his recollections of his childhood, I'm like, well, aspects of this seemed kind of nice. This like all you worry about is like producing what you need to survive. And that's kind of this this this UM. It doesn't it doesn't seem like a bad childhood, is what I will say about it. UM. Now, we did a recent episode where we talked about Melville Dewey that will be launching either before or right after this one. UM Dewey who invinced the Dewey decimal system and uh and hear him grow up in kind of a similar time and in a similar place, and the part of the Northeast they grow up and is commonly known as the burned over district. UM. And it's known that way because there's a shipload of different social and religious extremist like Protestant kind of movements that are swelling up and going swarming throughout the country during this period of time. UM and here him or was very aware of these kind of evangelical movements and the influence they were having on the culture, and he was not positive towards them. Neither was his family. And I'm going to read a long excerpt from his autobiography here because I think it's interesting and it gets you into this guy's head because he's he is in a their and extremely religious part of the United States. And it is absolutely not something that that that that he takes on in any sort of way. Quote. There have been several epidemics of Millerites in the state of Maine, sometimes called second Advents or world burners. These are Seventh Day Adventists or what becomes that that, on one occasion, having ascertained by diligent search in the Bible the exact day, hour, and minute that the world would come to an end, the saints disposed of their property. Some failed to plant their crops, as they had enough to last until the fatal day. When everything was in readiness for the final end of all things, which was fixed for a certain day in February. There was a lot of snow on the ground. Some of the saints took great care to have their watches and clocks corrected so as to know the exact minute the final crash would come. The hour fixed was about nine o'clock at night, and most of the women appeared in their ascension robes. The Saints met at a place called Gilman's Corner, in front of Gilman's Little Store. Some repairs had recently been made to the roof, and a ladder was still in position. A few minutes before the final send off, an old and very fat woman climbed up the ladder, got onto the ridgepole, and walked forward to the end of the roof. She stood there with her arms extended and her ascension robes fluttering in the wind like a pair of wings. One of the saints had his watch out and called off the time as it passed, and when the exact minute arrived, the old lady on the roof started to fly. She gave a jump and landed in a big pile of snow, which had a decidedly cooling effect and knocked every particle of superstition out of her. She never had a relapse. There was no one in the state of Maine that ridiculed this movement with more reason and vigor than my gifted mother. She had a lot of brains in the top and in the front of her head and made the best use of them. So that's his how he feels about these kind of this religious movement that sweeps through the country when he's a little kid. I find that fascinating. Yeah, as an engineer and a person that was clearly going to become a creator and an engineer and a stem minded person. Seems like, very often we don't see those types of things coexist. Someone that's very scientific or technical or engineering wine it tends to not be very superstitious and vice versa. They can be together, but yeah, mostly you don't see them together. Yeah, and it's interesting. He kind of his his family seems to be very much opposed to this, Like they're they're they're they're very practical people. Um, and he's kind of influenced. He He definitely grows up with this kind of very skeptical attitude about everyone around him, um, which is will kind of become more of a factor in his personality as he gets older. Um. But he grows up curious about the world and a fairly open minded person for his day. When he was fourteen years old, he was apprenticed to a carriage maker, where he learned the basics of engineering skills that would define his adult life. His first invention came shortly thereafter, when he was working in a mill with a terrific mouse problem. Here him set to work on his own and designed an automatic mouse trap, which was so successful that he was eventually able to patent it. Many mouse traps today are based off of his design, So like there's still mouse traps that are based off the one he designed. When he's like fourteen years old. UM, very smart kid, UM, and he's effectively adult, an adult at fourteen, right, Like that's that's a kid today. And like Germany in this period of time, you are legally an adult at fourteen, and he's that it's pretty much the same where where Maxim grows up. Like he's he's working full time at this point, he's making a man's wages and he's inventing a lot of ship. He designs in his late teen years a silicate blackboard UM in order to like make sketching out plans for other inventions easier, and he he markets that a bit um in the older adults around him recognized that he's kind of a genius. When he's twenty four, his uncle Levi hires him to work as an engineer in Abington, Massachusetts. UM. And his uncle gives his nephew freedom to think an experiment, which here him did until two years later he invented the curling iron. He received his patent in eighteen sixty six. And this is the first one he gets. He this is he's also the inventor of the curling iron. The guy who made the same dude invented the machine gun and the curling iron. So now we can do our fututions and we're getting rid of mice in our house. Maxim, thank you so much. I can blame him for the permanent scar I have from a curling and iron I touched when I was like seven. So yeah, my favorite meme the two hands shaking in the middle is Sophie and millions of dead European boys and meeting in the middle at angry at Hiram Maxims us with a bunch of mice at the bottom with little protot exactly. Uh, so, young Maxim was off to the races now. He designed an automated sprinkler system soon after, but he struggled to find investors for this product. We've talked about some like industrial fires in this period. Folks are not convinced that they need sprinklers or any kind of fire safety whatsoever in this period of time. Well, the children workers are easily replaceable. Yeah, there's a ton of kids you're gonna put sprinklers in. So yeah, he can't really find any investors for this um and he fails to convince any moneyment that there was a future in the idea, but he does draw interest from one wealthy backer, Spencer D. Schuiler. Uh Now, Schuiler is not really interested in selling his sprinkler system. He just sees that Maxim is extremely gifted. Um, and it's like, well, I wanna I want to hire this kid and profit off of his ideas. Uh Now, this was an era in which electricity had become enough of a thing that people knew any day now somebody was gonna make a light bulb that people wanted in their homes. Right, there are light bulbs at this point. None of the people involved in the story about to tell invented the first light bulb, but like, they're not good. They blow up their fire hazards, They're not really a thing you would want in your house. So it's this kind of thing where people are trying to figure out how to do a lightbulb. Well, and everyone knows it's going to happen, it just hasn't quite happened yet, right, Like, and there's kind of a race, right, all of these different a lot of money. Edison is putting a lot of money into like because everyone knows like, as soon as we figure this ship out, it's going to be huge, you know, artificial light anytime a day or night. That's a that's a big deal. A lot of money in that idea. UM. So Schuyler wanted in on that cash, and he formed the US Electric Lighting Company with the aim of being first to market. He made the young Heiram Maxim, his chief engineer. Now, the story that follows is very messy and a little beyond our scope today. The short version is that Maxim worked alongside a guy named William Sawyer. Sawyer was an inventor and is probably the man who created the incandescent electric lamp, the first good light bulb that you could like again, like the Sawyers, probably the guy who figures this out first. Um. But this is very messy because Edison also around the same time his people come out and there's a series of lawsuits over this, and saw Your wins most of the lawsuits with Edison over the invention of the light bulb. Again, he's probably the guy you would credit with US. Um. He's also kind of a sketchy character himself. In eighteen eighty he shot a doctor in the face during an argument about their wives. So like he's he is a messy fellow. Um and for the rest of his life Sawyer and here him work together at this company. For the rest of his life. Here And would argue that he was the inventor of the first incandescent electric lamp, or at least he claimed to have solved the problems that made Sawyers lamp possible. Now, he never names Sawyer in his autobiography, probably because he was scared of getting sued, but he does go into a lot of detail about the fact that his partner, who he calls Mr D, was a nearly useless alcoholic. And I feel the need to read an extensive quote from his autobiography here, because again, this is like the guy who probably invented the first electric incandescent lamp, and Maxim is so jealous about him that he has to turn him into like a fucking goblin in his autobiography, And I'm gonna read a quote from that now. I found a very curious state of affairs in Mr Schuyler's office. He had in his employee a large, clumsy, brutal looking fellow, clean shaven, who we will call Mr D. He was said to be an expert electrician and telegraph operator. But he was a great drunkard, being comfortably warned all the time, I had not heard that description of drunk. I think we should bring that back. You want to get in corned, Let's go get corn. Yeah. The next day he told me that he was a great believer in the future of electric lighting, that he was the first in the field, and that if I would take hold in a syst him, he would give me a salary of ten dollars a day, as well as a quarter interest in whatever might accrue from the work. This was an exceedingly good offer, especially as I had complete charge of the place. He informed all the men that I had been put in charge, and the first thing I did was have a talk with Mr d I told him that it was not quite the thing to have brandy brought into the place several times a day and to keep drinking it while at his desk. I assured him that there was a great deal more nourishment in a pint of milk than in a gallon of brandy, and advised him strongly to try milk. The next day, he provided himself with a two quart tin pail, and his brother was sent out two or three times for milk. Mr D said the change was a good one and he felt much better for it. Shortly after, I learned that the so called milk was just about half brandy and that the fellow was still in a half drunken condition all day. I have no idea if that's true. I was gonna say, did he just invent the brandy milk punch? He may have. It's possible that that Maxim is just lying because he's jealous. It's also possible that Maxim is telling the truth. This guy was a raging drunk and he still was invented the first incandescent electric lamp um. I just find that very funny. And also I I have trouble thinking of a more disgusting drink combination than brandy milk. That doesn't sound good to me. That doesn't. I don't mean like I like, I like a white Russian, but brandy and milk, Just straight brandy and milk. And we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll get corn. Maybe maybe i'd throw like a coffee liqueur in there or something, but changes over there. Yeah that would Yeah. I wonder how if you have if it curdles um anyway, So whatever the precise truth about Sawyer and his level of drunkenness by one to hear him was a powerful and respected engineer is in his own right. They don't beat Edison, but they make a bunch of electric lamps that are good for like industrial and entertainment lighting, and like they make a bunch of money right there. They're selling lights all over the goddamn place. So they Beta max of lights. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I think it works a little better than that. Um, unless you're a Beta max supremacist. No I'm not. I'm not. I'm not sitting underneath one of your antique rifles. Yeah, I watch all my video in Beta max. M hm. So one he goes to the Paris Exposition. Now we talked about in our Basil Zaharaf episodes where we're talking about like the birth of the arms industry as in its modern form. These expositions where a lot of that happens. And they're not just about weapons, right, every kind of a lot of ships being invented. There's combines and electric lights and all sorts of ship there, but the most popular things are always weapons, right, because human beings are are human beings and people are not that interested in in new fucking tractors. But if somebody makes a new gun, everybody's gonna be like, well I want to look at that motherfucker. Um, and this is are like we talked about the crups. This is like these are the same places where like Alfred krupp Is is putting his cannons out in the like um so eighty one to hear him goes to Europe for the Paris Exposition. His company had made a bunch of fancy new lighting equipment to show off, and he was basically running their booth. Uh, this was a very important job, but here him's interested hard already started to drift away from lighting. Now, the story that comes next maybe apocryphal. I did not find it in his autobiography, but every write up you ever find of here in Maxim will include this story. Um. I don't know if it actually happened. I think here him said it happened that some occasions, it seems a little bit like anyway, I'll just tell you the story. While he's at this this exposition, he's friends with an American and they're having a conversation about like the exposition and the different inventions there and his friends says to him, hang your chemistry and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable those Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility. And that is supposedly what gets him to start working on the Maximum gun um And if that's true, it does say a lot about him that somebody's like, you know, you make a lot of money helping Europeans murder each other, and he's like, absolutely, wasn't wrong, wasn't wrong, not at all wrong. Makes me think about Ron Harvard where they had the bed about how to make a bunch of money in religion, in this instance makes something to kill Europeans kill each other. Yeah yeah, and he uh, he decides to do this. Now there's another possibly apocryphal story to explain his his how he gets the idea of how to make the maximum gun, which is that he's out hunting with like his family when he's a little kid and he tries to fire it's it's usually said as a rifle. I it seems like I don't know if it's a rifle or a shotgun or something. But he's trying. He tries to fire a gun that's too powerful him because he's little, and it knocks him down. And this is what gives him the idea to make. The thing that made the Maxim gun so revolutionary is that it used the recoil. And obviously you know this, but for the listeners, it used the re oil of firing around to advance the next round. And that's why it's automatic, right, And that had not been done. There was no fully automatic weapons in that way at the time that we're actually like worked very well. Um. I don't know that I believe it. You know, he knocks himself down and that's what gives him the idea. Whether or not it's true. If you're an engineering minded person, it's not hard to notice that, Like, oh, every time I shoot a gun at recoils and this energy is just wasted, right, Like, there's all all this energy that I'm not we're not doing anything with like, and as an efficiency minded person, I have no trouble seeing how here could be, Like, I gotta find some way to tap into to make use of that. Um. Now, at the time, the closest thing we had to a machine gun was the gatling gun and and the gatling gun. They're they're actually not legally that difficult to get in a lot of the US today because they're not legally automatic because you don't pull the trigger and fire and it's crank operated. The legal definition of a machine gun is to fire more than one round perpress of the trigger, and does not do that. Yeah, so you could go get a gatling gun right now, listeners, if you want uh to defend your stagecoach. Um. I don't know what a gatling gun would be useful for in a modern context. You could conceal carry it to go to the Walgreens and pick up your prescription. It's a dangerous world. Put a pistol brace on a gatling gun. Um. So the gatling gun was pretty good at what it did for the time. Right, Like, if if you're in a world where there's not even a whole lot of semi automatic weapons and some motherfucker's got a gatling gun, that can be a pretty potent tool. Um. It has its uses, but it is not we would not call it today a good weapon. Um. It's very heavy, it's not easy to use, it is extremely prone to failure, and they're very hard to mass produced due in part to the fact that it's got a shipload of barrels, right, And because it has a shipload of barrels, it's much easier. It's actually much easier for a gun with a shipload of barrels to get way too hot than than the gun that Maxim makes. Maxim's gun has one barrel, but it's water cool. There's a big jacket around it that they fill with. I think it's like a gallon of water. And it turns out that's a much better way to stop a barrel from melting is quickly, um than than than just having like eight barrels on a rotating gun. UM. So Maxim's gun is like it's like going from UM. It's like everybody had a go kart and he's he pulls up in like a Toyota high Lux like it's it's it's just so much better than what it existed before. UM. One of the things that's probably important to know is that gatling guns, most of them at about two hundred rounds a minute was the rate of fire, which seemed huge for the day. The maximum gun could fire six hundred rounds a minute, and that's like the first version. It actually gets a lot faster. I think they get up to like a thousand rounds a minute. Um. But but it's he's it's it just blows every other machine type gun that exists at the time, and there's a number, there's like volley guns, people have all sorts of different ways. They tried to make a wet been that could suppress people by shooting a bunch of bullets. Maxims is just like there's not even a comparison to what came before. Yeah, and and when you said, like with the water cooling properly set up in a position, when you have a water tank to the left or right of it with a hose going into it, it evaporates and the evaporative water from the heat of the machine gun goes back into a condenser and you can actually keep a maximum machine gun fire essentially in perpetuity. Yeah, as long as there's bullets, like keeping gun bullets and water, you can keep shooting. Yeah, which come World War One, that's exactly what will happen. Um. Yeah, it's a it's a remarkable device. Um. Now Uh. Maxim immediately dubbed his new weapon once they had tested it out a daisy and he's set to work, putting it in front of representatives of several European governments. He starts trying to sell this to anyone who will buy it. The British are very impressed by this, and they give Maxim his first order. So he fought founds the Maximum machine Gun Company in London. But after this first big get, he has this like really impressive start, but then no one else is interested in the thing, right, Like, he just can't find buyers. There's a number of reasons we'll talk about for this part of it. Um is because Maxim winds up in a conflict with Bastard's Pod alumni Basil Zaharov, who was kind of like one of the dudes who innvinced the military industrial complex. Basil is an arms dealer at this point, um, and he initially dedicates himself to stamping out the Maximum Gun because it's bad for his profits. I'm going to read a quote from American Heritage magazine here. Maxim soon found that it was one thing to build a machine gun and quite another to sell it. When he tried to peddle his weapon to the European powers, he discovered they preferred the Norton Felt machine gun, even by the standards of the eighteen eighties, the Norton felt was was primitive, but its makers had one great commercial advantage. Basil Zaharov, a mysterious East European who was the best armed salesman in the world. Suave, persuasive, and utterly ruthless. Saharof's shadowed maxim around Europe, telling would be buyers that the superb new weapon was the work of a Yankee philosophical instrument maker who painstakingly made each gun to measurements of the utmost accuracy one part of a millimeter here or there, and it will not work. Do you expect you could get an army of Boston philosophical instrument makers to work them. So that's Zaharov's like tactic. He's not saying it's a bad gun. He's being like, well, it's too good a gun. You can't train your like these bum fuck infantry men. You have to actually operate this thing like it's way too smart for them. They're gonna break it um which is which is a smart way like, and anyone who sees it knows it's a good gun. So that's how you convince them it's a bad thing to buy When maliflus lying failed, Zaharof bribed officials to buy the nordon Felt. When bribery failed, He's sabotaged Maxims guns on the eve of their demonstration. Finally, Maxim merged with the norden Felt company. But even with the indefatigable Zaharov now on his side, he found the going rough. Many countries were suspicious of the revolutionary weapon, and others simply didn't care. One Turkish official waived Maxim aside, saying, invent a new vice for us, and we will receive you with open arms. That is what we want. And you do find that line in his autobiography. Whether or not it's apocryphal, I don't know. But um, he was really ahead of the game. The people couldn't. He was envisioning something that these people couldn't comprehend. You, yeah, yeah, And there's a lot of resistance. He tries to sell this to the United States, and the War Department doesn't want the thing. Um, we think it's it's seen as unworthy by military standards. And there's this you see this again when there starts to be this move to like give infantryman semi automatic and automatic weapons, where It's like they're just gonna waste the AMMO, Like this isn't gonna help anything out there, just gonna like ruin our supply lines and run through bullets too quickly. Um, there's this, you know, the these these old kind of like military brass types aren't don't really see how much this is going to change the nature of conflict. Um. There are some guys who do. But but but the people who are making purchasing decisions in the United States are like, absolutely not. We don't want these fucking things, which is and it says. It says a lot that Americans are turning down a gun like this, about like just how stuck in their ways they are. Somebody like yeah, um, and perhaps the machine gun would have remained a curiosity, something large mustache general scoffed at as they drank brandy in their war tents before ordering bayonet charges. But the British were more far sighted than most, not all of them. There's a lot of resistance in the British military towards adopting the maximum gun. Um. But there are guys who see the use that this thing is going to have, not to fight European wars, but to help them police their enormous colonial empire, because the British at this point control more of the world than damn near anyone has ever controlled. And there's not a lot of fucking British people right, like, they don't have many you known, you know, any more Boars per minute you can kill with the machine gun. Yeah yeah, yeah, um and ad break real quick, you know who else killed a lot of Boers? I've been just laughing at who it could possibly we we are. This podcast is entirely supported by Lord Kitchener. Um. Yeah, so uh go uh occupied mayficking and listen to these ads. It was a Boer war joke for abably sitting at home for the empire. Yeah whatever, Okay, we're back. So uh yeah British, some guys in the British Army see the max and theent is like, well, this is a thing that could actually help us deal with the manpower shortages we have in the fact that like this, the scramble for Africa is happening. In this period they've massively expanded their holdings. And this is also a period where kind of early on in the European occupation, um, they have this shock and awe thing because their weaponry is a lot better than what's available on the continent to the indigenous people. That's starting to change by the late eighteen hundreds. UH, Indigenous resistance in Africa in this period isn't mostly like dudes with you know, the very like kind of stereotypical images of guys with like shields and spears charging volleys of gunfire. It's insurgents with rifles. Like, they have rifles now, and their resistance is starting to get a lot more effective. Um So, while European weaponry had initially represented a Titanic advantage, that started to turn in this period. UM. Africans have a lot more access to guns, and enough time has passed that different groups have developed an understanding of European combat tactics and how to disrupt encounter them. This came to a head with the modest uprising. Like the Madhi the Islamic sort of um, yeah, messianic figure. Yeah, the Madi is like, is like the Islamic messianic Messianic is the word I was leaving for. It's the Islamic messianic figure. So there's this guy calls himself the Maddy. There's a big uprising um in like North East Africa against the British, like in the Soudan and everywhere. Um. And it doesn't go great for the British. They suffer some really significant reversals um. And it leads to like this whole situation gets out of hand enough that one of their governors, a guy named Imman Pasha, gets surrounded and sieged by this massive, fairly well equipped army of modest warriors. Now, despite the British Army's purchase of a number of Maxim guns, many generals still preferred the gatling gun. Others considered it, and this is a direct quote from a British general unsporting. So there's this attitude that, like, it's not sporting to have a machine gun, which it is not. They're not incorrect, colonialism is sporting. Killing too many of them with an automatic weapon is unsporting. So yeah, you have to at least give them some illusion of chance, right yeah yeah. Um. And in eighteen eighties six h Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who we have talked about a lot on this show, is sent to relieve and rescue Imman Pasha from the Mahdi's men. Now, this relief effort is kind of mess. But he's sent with a prototype of the Maxim gun and this is like the first time it's really used in colonial combat, mostly in like protecting his forces as they retreat, and it's it works great, Like if you are trying to run away while outnumbered, having a Maxim gun at your back is a pretty pretty sweet thing to fucking have. UM. So folks start to take notice within the British military braass that like, well, this thing's this This could solve a lot of problems for us UM and the battle leads to more widespread adoption of the Maximum gun by the Bridge. In eightee, all of this comes to a head in what is now Zimbabwe at the Battle of Shangani. Now, this was the most decisive battle of the First mata bell A War, and we talk about this a bit during our Cecil Rhodes episodes. UM. But the Battle of Shangani is a fight between or the Matabelli War is a fight between the forces of the British South Africa Company. So these are British soldiers, but they're soldiers of a corporation that's also kind of a froment in its own right. We talked about this in the most Corporation in the World episodes. We we've got over a number of these things. Um, and these guys, these British South Africa soldiers, This the Matta Belly War is the war that like leads to the establishment of Rhodesia. Right, this is like where we get the roadies and stuff from and a whole lot of problems as a result of that. It's still having that debate today, still having that probably, yeah, still still an uncomfortable number of Facebook ads selling me roodation camouflage. Kere. It is a nice pattern. Um so yeah, oh no, yeah, nothing against their aesthetics. Going out and fighting in that camera with your short shorts looked pretty cool. But what they were actually doing wasn't all that cool. No, it was not cool. Um but yeah. So the leader of the Matta Belly, a guy named Globin Gula, has twenty thousand riflemen. Um and the Matta Belly were competent strategists and pretty well organized and disciplined. At Sheanani, three thousand of their best men surrounded a force of seven hundred British soldiers. Now, in an earlier period, this probably would have been a massacre. Or at the very least a hard fought and brutal retreat for the British. But on this day the forces of the South Africa Company had the Maxim gun and the Mata Belle had not. In the slaughter that followed, more than fifteen hundred Matabelle are killed, largely by the four Maxim guns the British brought to bear on their forces. Four British soldiers died. Nothing like this had ever been seen in colonial warfare, like a kill ratio like this, um. It was it was unthinkable as a disaster for the Manta Belle. Their leader commits suicide on the battlefield. Several other warriors hang themselves during the retreat. It is um a calamity for them, and it is it's like it's a shock around the world because this is the first time that you see what a machine gun can do. Um And obviously fifteen hundred to four it's a pretty stark uh lesson here, yeah, real shades of the Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is I mean, I mean a number of the men killing the Matta Belli that day would probably die go on to get killed by machine guns on the Western front. Um. So it was very impactful back home Shangani, the battle is an instant hit back in England, there's breathless news coverage. There's all these lurid illustrations of like British soldiers heroically surrounded fighting off hordes of barbarians. And this has compounded a week later when a force of six thousand Mata Belli attack Bimbezi and are again massacred by mass fire from Maxim's gun. Twenty warriors die in this battle and Matta Belli resistance crumbles after this, bringing the whole world Rhodesia um. And these are just like these are nightmare battles, Like if you actually think about what it means to mow down with machine guns, it's horrific. But that's not the picture that the British people, like the people back home, are actually getting of these battles, which is we're going to talk about in a bit um. But the impact of this gun on the colonization of Africa is enough on its own that Maxim would get a place in behind the bastards. His gun makes the largest and most terrible era of European domination in Africa possible. Right, the actual, like the the real like the scramble for Africa and the real complete lockdown of the continent by Europeans. I don't think happens without the Maxim gun. It's absolutely necessary in a lot of the atrocities that comes next, and without Maxim there is certainly no Rhodesia Um And we could go on for a long time about the the horrors and lingering consequences of that pariah state. The centrality of the Maxim gun to colonial military strategy was immortalized by the writer Hilaire Bellock in a line uttered by one of his characters, whatever happens, we have got the Maximum gun and they have not. Now that's a quote I think a lot of people have heard, especially if you've listened to Dan Carlin's wonderful series on World War One. But it actually it's very meaningful for how soldiers thought about the mack some gun. That's not how civilians thought about the Maxim gun. And the actual the influence of the Maxim gun on the culture of colonizing nations is a lot more insidious than you might think. Now I want to show you a popular picture of the Battle of Shangani, illustrated by artist Richard Woodville. Jr. So if we can you drop that into the chat. This is really interesting and not something I really had thought about, because I had assumed when I read it, I'd read about this battle a few times. I thought, I assumed the people back home knew, Oh, we had a machine gun, and so we were able to kill a shipload of people, and that's why we didn't have so many warriors die. That's not what a lot of British people know. They just know four of our guys died for theirs because we're such good fighters, right Like, That's that's the lesson that they take. And it's a lesson that is um it's uh, it's put forward in a lot of these colonial paintings and illustrations. And this this this illustration I'm showing you right now, there's like a bunch of British soldiers and like cowboy style hats on a wagon train and they've got rifles in hand, and there's there's natives charging at them at very close range getting gunned down. There's dead horses, wounded British soldiers and it looks like it's happening at very close range, and it's this like desperate struggle, right that's fascinating because as as as as as noted, there's not a maxim here in sight. It really looks this this, this artwork is the typical authoritarian style artwork at which it shows the massive fighting capabilities and brilliance of our heroic men fighting off at this last stand and their their capabilities made it four to what you said. But the reality is we didn't want to give the citizens the reality that we were just massacring essentially defenseless people with improved technology. Yes, and it is it is really important to note, like you said, there's not a maximum gun visible in this every it's it's men with rifles, right, That's that's really worth noting. Um So the fact that this picture excludes the maximum gun to present an unrealistic picture. The battle is not an isolated event. In fact, historians have studied and written extensively about how comprehensively the maxim gun, arguably the most essential tool for this phase of colonialism, was excised from the British popular imagination. And I'm gonna quote now from a write up by Raymi Miz of the Rutger's Art Review Graduate Journal. Quote, these brutal imperial campaigns were subsequently met with a mountain of printed pictures in order to satiate the interests of an eager British public. Few artists contributed as prolifically as Richard Caton Woodville Jr. To the wealth of war imagery that colored the widely circulated illustrated newspapers. A self professed special war artist of the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, albeit one who had never personally experienced battle, Woodville submitted thousands of drawings to a wide variety of publications, covering almost every imperial crusade. His illustrations, prints and oil paintings incorporated the accepted motifs of high Victorian military art, such as the belief in great men and mill terry heroes. The depiction of war is an inspiring adventure, filled with noble sacrifice and a compositional focus on hand to hand combat and glorious cavalry charges, fraught with soldiers courageously lunging and thrusting with swords and bayonets. However, almost never does the machine gun upon which the majority of these colonial victories were wholly dependent make an appearance. So from the eighteen nineties up to the early nineteen hundreds, Colonial victories against what seemed like long odds were celebrated in the news and popular nonfiction with stories of heroism next to full color illustration of small bands of Englishmen surrounded fighting back to back against words of enemies. The maximum gun isn't in almost any of these pictures. It virtually does not appear in British popular illustrations of war in this period. Meanwhile, the individual man with a rifle is nearly worshiped, and there grows to be an increasing connection between the very idea of manhood and the rifle. As F. Nori's Connell wrote in his eighteen How Soldiers Fight. Apart from his physique, the Britisher has no particular qualification as a cavalier, and he lacks the quick intelligence of the boar and artilleryman. But give him a rifle and a bayonet, and let him have two years training to make a man of him, and yet two more to remind him that he cannot be one without the other. You see what he's saying there. You need all this training not just to teach you how to use a rifle and to make you into a man that, but to remind you that you're not a man without a rifle like that's it's this is masterful propaganda. And a lot of the history work I do within range I find what is so interesting to me isn't that the narrative itself that's painted, and frequently of the narratives are lies, or even if they're not lies, what's most interesting is the things are the things that are intentionally left out that paint the picture they want. And this is a great example of that. It's not it's not what they say, it's what they don't say that frequently makes the narrative. Yeah, and it's remind me to talk about how that kind of refer what in what might be about to be the modern version of this with modern weaponry um, because there's a conversation there. But in his paper, Raymie Miz cites this this guy's quote and makes what I think is an extremely astute observation quote In this estimation, the firearm is not simply an ancillary tool, but rather a constitutive agent in the making of the modern male soldier. Wood Fills pictures, when examined through this lens, demonstrate that the machine guns usage and physical mechanisms both analogize and reinscribe the volatile nature of constructions of masculinity at the turn of the century. In other words, the act of being a man with a rifle is seen as the ideal of manhood, but the reality, which is that individual rifleman matter very little next to the presence of a maxim gun that's hidden. Ramie goes on to write, the effectiveness of the gun was impervious to mass casualties. As long as one man survived to aim a functional gun, the odds remained in his favor. Manpower was rendered almost irrelevant, and the gun reigned supreme. As such, the machine gun was a vitally useful tool in the colonization of Africa, and, as John Ellis chillingly pronounces time and time again, automatic fire enabled small groups of settlers or soldiers to stamp out any indigenous resistance to their activities and to extend their writ over vast areas of the African continent. Yet, also according to Ellis, in England, in other countries, machine guns remained hidden until the very outbreak of World War One. As previously mentioned, this is certainly corroborated by the machine gun's absence in popular war imagery and news coverage. What might be the underlying reasons for such reluctance on the part of the army and special war artists to acknowledge the machine guns influence in their campaigns. For one, to quote Ellis once more, where was the glory? Where was the vicarious excitement for the reader's back home? If one told the truth about the totally superior firepower, one couldn't pin a medal on a weapon. The machine gun refuted the need for almost all forms of traditional Victorian military heroics, direct combat, cavalry charges and the traditional British infantry school air. As Ellis observes, Europeans, as particularly the British, were too concerned with trumpeting the virtues of their small squares of heroes to admit that much of the credit for these sickeningly total victories should go to the machine guns. I don't want to get ahead of the discussion here, but this makes me think right off the bat about the machine gunner using these weapons against the indigenous people not that different than someone sitting at a computer launching drone strikes. Yeah, that's one of the things I want to talk about. Another of them would be UM, the wire guided missile, which is almost invisible in American popular depictions of combat UM, but is uh the most important weapons system and a lot of the different conflicts that were involved in right now, and is UM. I have some some friends who are deep like one of the things they're concerned about is that, like, well, if you look at a lot of our near peer adversaries, one of the things that they're doing is they're putting a lot of wire guided missiles on small transports, UM, little armored vehicles and stuff like that, even on like technicals uh UM in the United States, which is very dependent on large armored vehicles like im wraps, does not do that to nearly so much of an extent. And these huge vehicles that we've built in order to render our troops effectively invulnerable to roadside bombs, into all forms of incoming fire, you they're almost can't shoot one of those things to pieces unless you've got like a fucking Milan or some other kind of wider guided missile, in which case it's just a big tomb UM. And it's one of those things. I can remember sitting in the fucking dustin Mosele with a couple of little Iraqi kids drinking water and like watching these massive im wraps drove by. Those are the only times I ever saw Americans that weren't journalists out and Mosel you never saw them in person. They were in these titanic and vulnerable vehicles, and uh, those things are more or less invulnerable when you're fighting somebody Who's best anti armor weapon as a homemade RPG UM or something they may have stolen from the Iraqi armory, but they're going to be increasingly useless in a world that has so many more of these weapons. In part of this, we've just been shot gutting them all over the goddamn place, like that's the big thing. We gave the Kurds a shipload and we get we've we've given them all over the place because it's an easy weapons system to give your allies to enable them to take out any kind of armored vehicle effectively. UM and the fact that it makes no presence in American popular imagination and is the kind of thing that I could think could be completely disruptive to us. Battle doctrine is something that is going to be a thing at some point, like the UM. But you know what else is completely disruptive to us battle doctrine. Carl. Uh. Social media, well yeah, yeah, that that that might take it hit yea Twitter, Twitter, um could be a real problem. Um. But also the products and services that support this podcast. Uh, we're back. One thing. I should also note you ever do any play any Warhammer when you were a kid, Carl? Actually I didn't. I mean, I'm really familiar with the aesthetic, but yeah, I never played it myself. It struck me as I was looking through all these old paintings of like British military victories in Africa, like, oh, that's what all of the old Warhammer arts is based on, because obviously those are kids all grew up in like British public schools and saw a million of these a circle of men surrounded by a horde of enemies like that sort of thing. Like, Yeah, it's interesting when you find those connections like that, the things that the echoes of things from the past that then manifest themselves and ways in the future, even so something as simple as science fiction art. Yeah, I always find that fascinating. Yeah, it's really interesting to me, and I'm sure there's more to be I'm sure somebody who wanted to could write a very interesting paper on that. Um. But yeah, So the point that my is the author of this paper is making is crucial to a number of the historical events that come next after kind of the Scramble for Africa. The supposed fearlessness of Colone Neil soldiers against tremendous numerical odds was made entirely possible by machine guns, but the massive popular imagination around these events led to widespread attitudes in Victorian England and beyond that the truest way to become a real man was to go and see war. And it was a pretty safe bet because since you've got the fucking maximum gun, you'll probably survive, and you'll you'll come back with this story or whatever, and you continue this this kind of legend of of what these fights are like, because you don't want to tell people, well, we just kind of pulled the trigger on a maxim gun until there weren't people left. Victorian scholar Angus McLaren notes, to be a man required effort and labor that was not required of a woman. One did not go to female by force to will her to be a woman. She was born one. And mis goes on to include The machine gun, however, negated most of these characteristics of manhood. Indeed, it obstructed any opportunity for legitimate confrontation when used against poorly armed opponents, and rendered obsolete qualities like strength and skill in hand to hand in combat. So the British and other colonizing nations are increasingly glorifying this idea of the colonial soldier, of the man willing to fight for his empire, of of the value of like physical courage and like being willing to get stuck into a fight, and also obscuring the fact that none of those qualities matter anymore because machine guns exist. We see this echo again in Rhodesia when their slogan was be a man amongst men. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's this, it's this very false idea of the nature of conflict in order to and in this period, it's less of a con because most of the men who joined the army in this period like that. You go over and get shipped Africa, Yeah, you'll probably make it back. You're you're not likely to face serious threat because you've got this weapon. Once the machine guns get turned on each other, you know, it's a different it's a different thing um. And of course the reality is that Maxim's gun had rendered courage, skill and toughness completely meaningless. Uh. Nothing matters when you're standing in front of a machine gun but that there's a man behind that machine gun. But an entire generation of British and European manhood was raised on fantasies about what war was going to mean in the twenty first century. Here Maxim got unfathomably rich, selling governments the instruments by which this generation would be slaughtered and mass By the end of the eighteen hundreds, all the nations of Europe were going gaga from Maxim's gun. He sold it to the Germans as the mg O nine, to the British is the Vickars and as his weapon flew off the proverbial shelves. He made regular improvements and upgrades to increase its reliability and killing power. He developed his own smokeless powder alongside his brother Hudson, which made the weapon much easier to use in mass confrontations between two proper armies. This is the last big development that makes it effective for European conflict. Because the first version of the Maxim gun, there's the kind of smoke that it makes is so distinctive that you can target it with artillery very easily. The new smokeless powder and makes it a lot harder to see and thus harder to like just blow up the machine guns when you find them with you know, field guns or whatnot. Um Maxim is over was overjoyed to sell his weapon to multiple sides in the same war. This happened first in nineteen o five, when both the Russians and Japanese went to battle with his guns. If any of these powers were irritated at Maxim, they wanted his weapon badly enough to keep their mouth shut. The Queen of England made him a British citizen in nineteen hundred, which he was happy to accept. He had never quite forgiven the United States for refusing to buy his weapon. Most of the rest of Maxim's life was, in fact a process of him using his fame and wealth to harp on slights and grudges. His autobiography was largely a canvas for him to lay out petty irritations against other inventors. He even fell out with his brother Hudson, jealous that Hudson had an equal faculty for invention At one point, Hiram hired a private detective to stalk his brother and sabotage his work. Hudson would later claim, he told me one time that if the telescope hadn't been invented, he would have invented it. And I think he never felt kindly towards Galileo for having got ahead of him. That's he's very offended by the fact that other people make things. Uh so, yeah, a bit of a dick. Hudson responded to his brother's provocation by tracking down Helen Layton, a teenage girl that here Him had tricked into marrying him while he was already married to someone else. Maxim was charged with bigamy. Although he was acquitted, the charges ensured that he was the subject of mockery and whispered discussion for the rest of his life. By the time he was an old man, here Him was completely deaf from years of weapons testing without hearing protection. He also suffered bronchitis for the last sixteen years of his life, which has probably had something to do with, you know, all of the gunpowder and explosions and stuff he hung out around, or whatever chemicals he was every day. Could God only knows what kind of ship he was inhaling, you know, Um, yeah, uh. And that actually led to his last really significant invention, which was an inhaler to basically help with like asthma and the like. He called the Pipe of Peace UM his design because you couldn't spray with the kind of force that you can today. It was like a long glass tube where you would kind of like a crack pipe, heat a thing in a glass bulb and then inhale it to the back of the throat. UM, which was it was. It was a big improvement over similar kinds of devices that had existed before. UM. He filled his with menthol and evergreen mixed with water. UM. And he believes this is the first time that mental was ever used for this account, to like actually decongest and sue the throat. He's the first person to use menthol for that purpose, um, he claims. Um. I don't I I haven't found any arguments against that. I'm sure it was used in in some sort of indigenous medicine before he came across it. But he's certainly the first person to like do this and market it. UM and these are very popular his inhalers. He sells hundreds of thousands of these um, and it's it's funny because, like, this is actually a really significant invention. It's a major device within kind of the line of descendant of the asthma inhaler and stuff like, it's a very meaningful development for like human health that he contributes to here um. But a lot of people make fun of him for it. They call it like a quack remedy and attack him for it in a way that he never had been before in his career. And so in his nineteen fifteen autobiography, Maxim wrote, quote, it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering. He and wrong, that's what people like, right, No, seriously, this is so interesting. This guy was all over the board. I mean, from being being associated with the light bulb to making one of the worst in terms of effective killing machines on the battlefield, to something that actually legitimately was a medical health device. I mean that's wild. Yeah, it is. I mean the curling iron, don't forget the curling iron is obviously curling uh Hiram Maxim lived long enough to see his weapon reach its pothesis during the outbreak of the First World War. He died in the winter of nineteen sixteen, most of the way through the Battle of the Psalm. By that point in the war were than seven hundred and fifty thousand British soldiers had been killed. The majority of these deaths, by some accounts like two thirds were the result of German machine guns, and one day at the Song more than twenty thousand British boys were cut down by machine gun fire. Um so he lives to see it, and in the days before his death, there's no evidence that he was actually troubled by this at all. According to the website American Heritage Quote, he had other concerns. In his last years. He had rented a front room at the top of the building in a London business district, and there he spent hours blowing black beans out of a pea shooter at a Salvation Army band that regularly played across the street. Such interesting questions about like it raises such interesting questions because technology is going to advance, whether you're the person doing it or there was gonna be another machine gun right, and so I'm not justifying. At the same time, the question is if it wasn't maximum with someone else, So I bet you that was pretty much where he was putting his mindset at that point. You have to write, especially when you're hearing like, oh I made a thing and twenty kids died in a day because of it, Like yeah, of course you and you're not like obviously and other people were working on this. Someone would have made a machine And I think you could argue it like yeah, but maybe he was so smart. Maybe it would have taken another ten years. And maybe that means colonialism in Africa never really gets to the same point, or like we can do what ifs all the day, live long day. Obviously, I I tend to be more trends and forces than great man. And it's like someone would have developed this, right, there would have been machine guns mowing down a generation of of of European youth in World War One, with or without here in maxim. Maybe the guns wouldn't have worked as well, maybe it would have taken longer. You know, these are all things that can be debated on. He was predominantly done with single shot trapter or rifles. Right, yeah, yeah, Um, so obviously it's one of those things. It's probable. I think it's either kind of between him or Krupp because Field artiller, he also kills an astronomical number of people. Um probably, but probably him or Crupp. That you would say is like the weapon inventor, who's whose invention killed the most people, both directly and like every other machine gun that exists up to the modern day is in some way descended from the maximum gun, right like, even if it's just descended, and that machine guns have a place in every military as a result of the success of the maxim guns. The same with like Crup's artillery, right like, it's all descended. That said, if Krupp hadn't figured out how to make cannons better than the big old brass Napoleonic ones, someone was going to write like it these are all worth talking about. Um yeah. That's one of the interesting questions that always pops up with the work I do, especially with firearms, and it applies to this, which is I intrinsically come from the idea that technology is going to happen regardless, and that the question isn't sure or should not technology exists I mean, there's a lot of things in this world I wish didn't exist. To be nice, to live in a world without water, cold belt field, machine guns, and nuclear weapons. But the reality is they do. And the problem isn't necessarily this technology. It's what we as humans do with it. Yeah, and it's and I think that's where the degree to which he's more morally culpable is the Yeah, of course I'll sell the both sides that everyone should have this thing. I want to get this out there as much as is fucking possible. Um. And then to be honest, though, like the greatest evil done as a result of the maximum gun is I think what we talked about in the middle of the episode, the hiding it from the populaces of the nations, using it until it couldn't be hidden anymore. That's and that's not on maxim. That's just that that there's a lot of blame to go around there, and it's it's a really fascinating thing to think about. And that's the thing that didn't have to happen, right, someone was going to make a machine gun. It wasn't inevitable that the machine gun would be hidden from the people paying for it to be used on other folks. That wasn't inevitable. It makes you wonder what we're not aware of right now? Yeah, well, yeah, we can talk about a number of different weapons systems, yeah, or other things for that matter, right yeah, But yeah, that's the story of here in Maxim Carl, that's that's pretty amazing. I mean, obviously I'm very familiar with the weapon and what it was, what it was used for World War One. I was not as familiar with it's used in the colonial efforts, which is particularly fascinating. Like I said earlier, the what's what's masterful propaganda is less about what people talk about, but what they leave out of the narrative, and that in this instance painted a very dismal picture. Like you said, there's no honor in going to be a soldier for the British Empire and then pushing a button and slaughtering people defenselessly. There's no honor and that even that's not sporting, as they would say, right, um and uh. But at the same time, they definitely wanted people to feel as though that the that honor was to be in that in that empire, and to further the empire's goals, the amount of people murdered in the process totally irrelevant. Yeah, And it is this thing where war becomes very unsporting. Um. And that's that's a big part of like this, the first year, particularly of World War One, is all of these these gallants French soldiers and their colorful pants, and these legions of German sixteen year old boys that the slaughter of the Hitler's first big battle, if I'm not mistaken, Um, all of these young men who learned very quickly that there's nothing sporting about war any longer, if indeed there ever was an interesting read in that regard, if you ever read Manfred von rich Toff and the Red Baron's autobiography, Um, he talks about being in the first cavalry charges of the war and very quickly being someone of Prussian descent on the ability to do something different. He decides, Wow, this isn't what I thought it was gonna be. I'm gonna go join the air service, right, but it's a really interesting um. The first couple of chapters of his autobiography or very much about this is what I thought I was going to see and this is what I actually saw. Yeah, And it's it's a lot of people were shocked, I think when they ran into the first fuselid, a fully automatic fire. It's it's remarkable. And in terms of like how recent a lot of this was, I interviewed a man once who had he was fourteen when World War ended, and in the Hitler Youth. He was a German Man. His grandfather was a Prussian cavalryman who had fought in the War of eighteen seventy and and charged men on horseback with a sword. And I like, I shook hands with this man who had shaken hands with a man who fought on horseback with a saber like that. It's it's not that far ago. It's not that long ago that like that was war, um. And it was Maxim's gun that had a major role in why that seems like the fucking medieval days now? Yeah, that in the aircraft, right, those are the two that to me right off the bat changed everything so much that the world was completely unrecognizable within two years. Yeah, yeah, it's it's really it's something else. Um, Well, Carl, we've got more to talk about another another guy who made a gun and also a guy who we don't have to do the whole Well, someone would have made it thing, because absolutely no other fucking person would have made the kind of happens this dude was obsessed with making. He's a beautiful maniac. We will be talking about him in part two, but for right now, Carl, do you have any playables to plug? Uh? I mean, just my normal thing I run in Range TV. You can find my content, you can find all my different distribution points at enrange dot tv. Um. I'm sometimes referred to as an alternative voice in the firearms content creator community in that I'm actually trying to be inclusive and believe that rights are for everyone, up for a specific category of people, and that makes you controversial in the firearms community. But if that's your bag, come check me out at Enrange dot tv. Definitely check Carl out at enranged TV. And um, you know, get yourself a gatling gun. There's nothing stopping you. I don't know, I don't know I was feeling. I mean, if you're feeling a little colonial, you won't want to maxim right, Or if you're feeling like world domination, maybe some sort of tactical nuke. I mean, they'll probably available on the market now, right, I mean fingers crossed. That that would really make me feel a lot safer when I go out to fred Meyer to to do my grocery shopping. Well, I mean what I mean a minute, man or two, just a couple of minute minute, you know, like a dinger with them. What's more viable than a personal's false defense item except like a little, tiny tactical nuke on your belt. Look, if everybody had a tiny tactical nuke, we would no longer have fist fights. Hey, the only thing that stops the bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a new That's right, That's right. Uh? That well, that was the story of the cold for it was all right. Well that's all for Part one. Part two Electric Boogaloo coming up.