Belts, Drums and Hoppers: Machine Guns from the Colt-Browning M1895 to the M240

The Colt-Browning M1895 was the first successful gas-operated machine gun to enter service. Its swinging lever beneath the barrel, which cycled the action, earned it the nickname potato digger. It was air cooled and belt fed, fired at roughly 450 rounds per minute, and served the United States Navy and Marine Corps before export to users including Canada, France and Russia.

The MG 08 was the standard heavy machine gun of the Imperial German Army in the First World War, adapted from Hiram Maxim's 1884 design. It fired about 500 rounds per minute in its first lock and 600 in the later Schloss 16, and telescopic sights let crews use it for long-range direct and indirect fire.

The Type 11 was the first light machine gun issued by Japan, in 1922. Kijiro Nambu gave it a hopper that took five-round clips, an unusual feed that proved troublesome in combat, yet it stayed in service as a squad weapon until 1945.

The Degtyaryov DP-27 went through trials in 1927 and was deployed generally in 1928. It became the standard Soviet infantry light machine gun of the Second World War, with roughly 795,000 built, and was replaced in 1946 by the RP-46, which converted the design to belt feed.

Introduced in 1936, the Type 96 fed the 6.5x50mm Arisaka cartridge from 30-round top-mounted magazines. Poor ballistic performance and reliability problems led Japan to try replacing it with the Type 99, yet both stayed in service to the end of the war, with about 41,000 Type 96 guns built.

The DShK entered production in 1938 as a Soviet heavy machine gun, with a belt feed that Georgi Shpagin added to Vasily Degtyaryov's design. It fires the 12.7 by 108 millimeter cartridge, more than a million were built by 1980, and it is one of only two fifty caliber class guns designed before the Second World War that remain in service.

The Besa was the British version of the Czechoslovak ZB-53, named for the Birmingham Small Arms Company that licensed it. Production began in 1939, and it served through the Second World War as armored vehicle armament, replacing the heavier water-cooled Vickers gun even though it needed a larger opening in the hull.

Melvin Johnson's light machine gun was recoil operated and fed from a curved magazine on the left of the receiver, and its rate of fire could be adjusted between about 450 and 700 rounds per minute depending on variant. It was produced from 1940 to 1945 and stayed in limited service until 1961.

The FN MAG entered production in 1958 and combined a locking mechanism modeled on the Browning M1918 automatic rifle with a feed system derived from the German MG 42. It has a quick-change barrel and an adjustable cyclic rate of 650 to 1,000 rounds per minute, and more than 200,000 have been made for users in over eighty countries.

General Electric designed the M134 Minigun in 1960 and it entered service in 1963. Six electrically driven barrels in a Gatling style let it fire between 2,000 and 6,000 rounds per minute, and it has armed helicopters, aircraft and vehicles from the Vietnam War to the War in Afghanistan.

The RPK-74 is the squad automatic version of the AK-74 rifle, introduced in 1974 and chambered in 5.45x39mm. It differs from the rifle in its longer, heavier chrome-plated barrel, folding bipod and reinforced rear trunnion, giving a squad more sustained fire than an individual rifle, and it remains in service.

The M240 is the American designation for the FN MAG, which closes this path where the FN MAG stop began. The United States adopted it in 1977 as the Army standard coaxial machine gun for tanks and armored vehicles, and it is built for American use by U.S. Ordnance and FN America.