[Johnny C. Kitchens]

I read that Maxim was inspired by the steam engine in developing the toggle lock. He supposedly noticed that at top dead center the steam engine could resist a lot of force. With a bump of the flywheel it would start to work. If you look at his first design it did indeed resemble a steam engine in many ways. The difference being that it rotated one way for one shot then the other for the next shot. This was to control momentum, which might cause the parts to out run the actual firing. His refinement of the mechanism gave us the toggle lock more like the one we know...