gatling was followed by maxim, and maxim took the gatling gun, you needed to crank the gatling gun, it was not an automatic weapon as you understand it. it was a manually-fired rapid-fire weapon, and the maxim gun used the excess energy from one expended round to, if you would, reload the next round and fire it, and so the maxim gun would continue to fire without a crank just by depressing the firing mechanism until it rant out of -- ran out of ammunition or until you released that firing mechanism, the trigger, if you will. maxim didn't frame it this way at all. maxim thought that, you know, killing in the service of the crown was an effective way for the crown to, you know, execute its power over its subjects. maxim was pretty clear on that. at one point even they asked maxim to design a weapon that could be used against ammunition cards, and he wasn't interested. he said, you know, why would i want to make a weapon to shoot ammunition cards? i'm making a weapon to shoot men. and i think that, you know, when we look back at gatling, it'd be really interesting if we could get to him a

and i think if we look back at gatling, would be interesting if we could find out what he really thought as opposed to his sales message. >> host: maybe not so much a clear progression, if you compare that period of time to the competition to create this new generation of weapons, the motivation and then was similar was articulated in a much different way. >> guest: we had gone a long way from the maximum. automatic weapons had been struck down under 20 pounds but they still cannot be used by anyone of you. they were too heavy. unwieldy, generate a lot of p and tended to break and two or three people needed to use them. what the germans figured out late thirties and world war ii is that if you took a pistol bullet and a rifle bullet and you made some day midway in between that you'd have the intermediate power and if you build a rifle around this it to be manageable by one person even if fired automatically. the germans came up with the i.d.'s and these weapons were rushed out to the eastern front midway through world war ii and the russians got their hands on them. and they have bent pr