In the photo, I'd like to highlight Maxim gun. This machine gun is a sample of how private companies are superior to public ones. Maxim gun was developed by the British armourer of American origin, Khayrem Stevens Maxim, in 1883. Being one of the progenitors of automatic weapons all over the world, already obsolete, Maxim gun is still in our days.
After the invention of the machine gun, Maxim long tried to sell it to anyone, but, no one was interested in buying. King of Denmark Christian IX saw the machine gun in action called machine-gun firing as an aimless waste of cartridges.
And only British banker Nathaniel Rothschild agreed to finance the production of the machine gun.
Battle baptism of the machine gun took place in 1893 during the suppression of the uprising Matabele in southern Africa.
And after that, the invention was appreciated. In America - in the homeland of the inventor, the machine was copied by the company Colt, for which he was accused of plagiarism and forced to buy a patent for its production.
Kaiser Wilhelm, being in London personally, sat down behind the machine gun and pressed the trigger. Kaiser was impressed with the machine gun and ordered his court to get the right to manufacture machine guns in Germany.
In 1897, Vickers bought out Maxim's enterprises, and he himself became the owner of a stake in this company. After the expiry of the patent, Vickers engineers added a number of constructive changes, the machine gun was sold under the Vickers brand and is officially known mainly under this name.
In Russia, and subsequently in the USSR, the machine gun was traditionally named after the developer, even after a very significant revision by Russian gunsmiths. The royal government received a license for the production of machine guns at the Tula arms factory in 1905.