U.S. Army Lt. Col. Isaac Newton Lewis took a failed design and ran with it, producing one of the best light machine guns the world saw in the first half of the 20th Century.
The Buffalo Arms Company or Buffalo, New York in 1910 was high and dry. They owned a series of patents to rather forward-thinking gun designs, to include a 37mm auto cannon and a huge tripod-mounted, gas-operated, water-cooled machine gun in .30-40 Krag, both of which were produced by one Samuel MacLean. Unable to get these off the drawing board and into production, BAC approached Lewis and asked him to moonlight.
At the time Lewis was the director of the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery School at Fort Monroe and known as something of an inventor and accomplished engineer in his own right, having designed the Depression Position Finder– the Army’s fire control device to aim artillery over distance, as well as electric lighting systems, modern electric windmill generators, and chart plotting systems.
The gun he came up with, while based on MacLean’s original patents, was altogether different.
Fully Transferrable Class III BSA Lewis Mark II Medium Machine Gun, (sold at auction in 2014 for $11k)
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