Last night, I wrote about Alonzo Gray and his opinions on the future of cavalry with respect to machines guns, motor vehicles, and airplanes. My point was our difficulty in recognizing why our predecessors failed to see the possibilities of new machines. There is a reverse side to this too. When we look back at the beginnings of a technology, we notoriously do so with the prescience of hindsight. We often make the mistake of attributing all the power of the mature machine to its embryonic form. We then wonder why it failed to have the impact we would have expected, or been sufficiently appreciated at the time, probably due to some mistaken and fixed belief against it. The machine gun is a good case in point.
Mechanical precursors to the machine gun antedate the First World War by two centuries. The Puckle Gun of 1718, which operated something like a gigantic revolver, was the first. It had the misfortune both of appearing after the end of a long and exhausting war (War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1714) and of being overly complicated, probably to complex to be produced in any numbers.
The mitrailleuse (a multi-barreled, hand-operated weapon) is a completely different story. It was adopted in large numbers by the French army under Napoleon III in the 1860s. It did cause terrible casualties on occasion during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-18710), but it was hampered in part by conceptual issues, in part by secrecy, but in part by its own nature. The main conceptual issue was whether to treat it as an infantry weapon or as an artillery piece. That may sound like a trivial, quibbling distinction, but it was critical. Because it was decided that it should operate as artillery, it was used at the ranges typical of artillery in its day. Unfortunately, its range was too limited for that use, so its use was restricted in ways it would not have been had it been assigned directly to the infantry (as Maxim machine guns were in the First World War). Because it was kept in great secrecy before the War, the crews were not fully prepared and issues that would normally have been worked out before the fighting began were not.
We are used to seeing film from the World Wars of machine guns cutting down entire platoons in the blink of an eye. The mitrailleuse had a much lower rate of fire and could not easily be directed across a wide area. Instead, it was possible, maybe even typical for it to simply obliterate one or two men at a time. This was undoubtedly terrifying to advancing troops, but it would not necessarily stop an attack. It simply did not have the technical sophistication of the later fully automatic weapons, or even of some contemporary hand-cranked ones like the Gatling, the Nordenfeldt, or the Gardner.
Because we tend to project the character of the mature technology back on its earliest variants, it is natural for us to exaggerate the non-technical problems (inappropriate use as an artillery weapon and the effects of secrecy) and neglect the technical issues when we read about the French defeats in 1870. Of course we do not do this just with machine guns. We do it with most technologies unless we have lived through their evolution ourselves. That makes it too easy for us to criticize decisions made about machines and the uses they were put to in any given time. It also makes us wonder about the intelligence or character of men and women who failed to see the potential of new technologies as they first emerged. This is just one more of those filters through which we too often distort the past.
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