Ever elusive parabellum rifles.

[Johnny C. Kitchens]

Several firearms of the mid 19th century featured toggle locks. Henry's repeating rifle, Winchester, and Smith & Wesson. Many have speculated that Maxim would have been exposed to those mechanism and transfered the idea to the machine gun. They even shared the toggle breaking downward. Maxim's first experiments involved a modified Winchester, just to prove the theory. His first working model, looked like it used the principles of a steam engine. It makes one revolution per shot, but with a difference of changing direction of rotation for each shot. Maxim was a very intelligent man, an American, who was paid to live outside of America, by the Edison and financial backers group who were tired of having to compete with him. I always thought that was interesting...