De Witt Clinton

Name	Street	Town	State	From	To
De Witt Clinton		Farrington		1872	1881

Patent	Date	Remarks
133,929	December 17, 1872	Improvement in Primers for Cartridges view patent
134,368	December 31, 1872	Improvement in Metallic Cartridges view patent
241,130	May 10, 1881	Machine-Gun view patent

Contract	for

Product
Clinton De Witt founded the Lowell Manufacturing Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, to produce the Lowell machine gun, invented in 1875, a machine gun with four barrels, only one of which was used at a time, which was operated by hand and had an overhead magazine. After 300 or 400 shots, when the barrel was overheated, the barrel bundle was rotated 90 degrees and a cold barrel was lined up for firing. In a test by the US Navy in 1875, 2100 rounds were fired in 8.5 minutes, including the time it took to change barrels. By this time, however, the USA and the major European nations were already well equipped with machine guns, and the Lowell failed to find an adequate market, despite being an effective weapon - perhaps the best of the hand-cranked rifles.

Product

Clinton De Witt founded the Lowell Manufacturing Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, to produce the Lowell machine gun, invented in 1875, a machine gun with four barrels, only one of which was used at a time, which was operated by hand and had an overhead magazine. After 300 or 400 shots, when the barrel was overheated, the barrel bundle was rotated 90 degrees and a cold barrel was lined up for firing.

In a test by the US Navy in 1875, 2100 rounds were fired in 8.5 minutes, including the time it took to change barrels. By this time, however, the USA and the major European nations were already well equipped with machine guns, and the Lowell failed to find an adequate market, despite being an effective weapon - perhaps the best of the hand-cranked rifles.