Isaac Newton Lewis

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Isaac Newton Lewis

Isaac Newton Lewis (born October 12, 1858 in New Salem , Pennsylvania , † November 9, 1931 in Hoboken , New Jersey ) was an American inventor . He is best known for developing the Lewis machine gun .

Life

Military career

Lewis attended the United States Military Academy from 1880 and graduated from it in 1884. He served in the United States Army in the artillery force . First he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth from 1888-1890 , followed by administrative activities in the New York harbor from 1894 to 1898 and Washington, DC from 1898 to 1902. In the summer of 1900, Lewis was ordered to Europe to study current weapons technology with various European armed forces. His subsequent report led to the introduction of modern rapid-fire guns in the field artillery . From 1904 to 1911 he was the director of the coastal artillery school at Fort Monroe .

Lewis was a gifted inventor. During his service at Fort Leavenworth he developed a range finder , which was later incorporated into the official equipment. In the military field, he received various patents such. B. for a fire control system , a rapid fire gun and a torpedo . He also developed various devices in the civil sector, including a self-regulating DC machine .

Lewis Gun

Lewis machine gun

By far the most important invention by Lewis was the machine gun named after him. Lewis was involved in experiments with the water-cooled machine gun designed by Samuel Neal McClean from 1900. However, even after a long development period, McClean did not want to be successful. In early 1910, McClean's financiers approached Lewis and secured him a large stake in the company if he designed a usable machine gun. Lewis redesigned the McClean machine gun; above all, he switched it to air cooling. In September 1910 he signed a partnership agreement with the Automatic Arms Company . To perfect the prototype and to market it, he took a year off from the US Army. Lewis, with the help of General Leonard Wood , presented the machine gun to high-ranking representatives of the US Army. He tried William Crozier , the head of the Ordnance Department responsible for weapons development, to circumvent due to mutual personal animosities . However, he could not convince the US Army and was forced to resume his service in September 1912. Frustrated, he left the US Army in 1913 with the rank of colonel and traveled to Europe to market his machine gun there. The first contacts with British and Belgian representatives were promising. Lewis then opened the subsidiary "Armes Automatiques Lewis SA" in Belgium and planned to build a factory in Liege . But he got a lucrative offer to produce his weapon from the arms manufacturer Birmingham Small Arms Company from England, which he finally accepted. Shortly afterwards, the First World War (1914-1918) broke out and the Allies (especially the United Kingdom) introduced the Lewis machine gun into their armed forces.

When the US finally imported the weapon in large quantities towards the end of the war, Lewis refused to accept just over a million US dollars in royalties out of patriotism . Due to the license fees that the Allies had to pay, he still amassed a considerable fortune.

retirement

In January 1919 he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute awarded. Lewis sat in Montclair to rest . In his final years he was chairman of the board of directors of the Research Corporation and was also active on other supervisory bodies. Lewis died of a sudden heart attack on November 9, 1931 after visiting New York City . He was buried with military honors in the United States Military Academy War Cemetery.

Web links

literature

  • George M. Chinn: Chapter 2 Lewis Aircraft Machine Gun in: The Machine Gun: History, Evolution, and Development of Manual, Automatic, and Airborne Repeating Weapons , 1951, Department of the Navy [6]
  • Neil Grant: The Lewis Gun , Osprey Publishing , 2014, ISBN 9781782007913 .
  • Walter F. Bell: Lewis, Isaac Newton in: Home Front Heroes: A Biographical Dictionary of Americans During Wartime, Volume 2 , Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007 ISBN 9780313334221 p. 520 [7]

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Isaac Newton Lewis in: Encyclopædia Britannica , accessed April 13, 2016.
  2. ^ A b c d e f Sixty-third Annual Reunion of the Association of the Graduates of the United States Military Academy, June 9, 1932, pp. 150–157 [1]
  3. ↑ Grant: The Lewis Gun , 2014, pp. 8-9.
  4. ↑ Chinn: The Machine Gun , 1951, p. 278.
  5. ↑ Grant: The Lewis Gun , 2014, pp. 8-9.
  6. ^ Grant: The Lewis Gun , 2014, pp. 10-11.
  7. ↑ Grant: The Lewis Gun , 2014, pp. 65-66.
  8. ↑ Chinn: The Machine Gun , 1951, pp. 297-299.
personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Isaac Newton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American soldier and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH October 12, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH New Salem , Pennsylvania , USA
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 1931
Place of death Hoboken , New Jersey, USA