Hiram Maxim was an Englishman who was very inventive, so he may really have been German. He introduced his automatic machine gun to the British Army in 1885, and decisively speeded up the process of killing people. His gun could shoot more than 500 rounds per minute, giving it the firepower of about 100 rifles. The basic idea behind Maxim's gun, as well as the hundreds of machine gun designs that followed, was to use the power of the cartridge explosion to reload and re-cock the gun after each shot. The first basic mechanism for harnessing this power was the Recoil System. When you propel a bullet down the barrel, the forward force of the bullet has an opposite force that pushes the gun backward. In a gun built like a revolver, this recoil force just pushes the gun back at the shooter. But in a recoil-based machine gun, moving mechanisms inside the gun absorb some of this recoil force. Here's how: To prepare this gun to fire, you pull the breech bolt back, so it pushes in the rear spring. The trigger sear catches onto the bolt and holds it in place. The feed system runs an ammunition belt through the gun, loading a cartridge into the breech. When you pull the trigger, it releases the bolt, and the spring drives the bolt forward. The bolt pushes the cartridge from the breech into the chamber. The impact of the bolt firing pin on the cartridge ignites the primer, which explodes the propellant, which drives the bullet down the barrel. The barrel and the bolt have a locking mechanism that fastens them together on impact. In this gun, both the bolt and the barrel can move freely in the gun housing. The force of the moving bullet applies an opposite force on the barrel, pushing it and the bolt backward. As the bolt and barrel slide backward, they move past a metal piece that unlocks them. When the pieces separate, the barrel spring pushes the barrel forward, while the bolt keeps moving backward. The bolt is connected to an extractor, which removes the spent shell from the barrel. In a typical system, the extractor has a small lip that grips onto a narrow rim at the base of the shell. As the bolt recoils, the extractor slides with it, pulling the empty shell backward. The backward motion of the bolt also activates the ejection system. The ejector's job is to remove the spent shell from the extractor and drive it out of an ejection port. When the spent shell is extracted, the feeding system can load a new cartridge into the breech. If you keep the trigger depressed, the rear spring will drive the bolt against the new cartridge, starting the whole cycle over again. If you release the trigger, the sear will catch hold of the bolt and keep it from swinging forward. In future parodies, I will discuss the Blowback System and the Gas System.