Before the year ended the enormous task of providing the special machinery for this practically new industry was well under way. The Hopkins & Allen factory, at Norwich, Conn., had been engaged upon a contract for military rifles for the Belgian government. Before this order was completed the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation took over the Hopkins & Allen plant and set it to producing parts for the light Browning automatic rifles. Even this concern, however, could not produce the parts in sufficient quantities for the Marlin-Rockwell order, and the latter concern accordingly acquired the Mayo Radiator factory, at New Haven, and equipped it with machine tools for the production of Browning automatic-rifle parts. Such expansion was merely typical of what went on in the other concerns engaged in our machine-gun production. Immense quantities of new machinery had to be built and set up in all these factories. But still the Ordnance Department kept on expanding the machine-gun capacity. The New England Westinghouse Co., of Springfield, Mass., in January, 1918, completed a contract for rifles for the Russian government and was at once given an order for Browning water-cooled guns. For reasons which will be explained later, the original order for Browning aircraft guns, which had been placed with the Remington Arms Co., was later transferred to the New England Westinghouse Co. at their Springfield plant. [Illustration: BENÉT-MERCIÉ MACHINE GUN.] [Illustration: HOTCHKISS MACHINE GUN, MODEL 1914, 8-MILLIMETER. This is the machine gun adopted by the French Army. This gun is of a heavy type, air-cooled, gas-operated, and fed from either a strip holding 30 cartridges or a metallic link belt. Its rate of fire is about 500 rounds per minute.] [Illustration: VICKERS MACHINE GUN, MODEL 1915, CALIBER .30.] [Illustration: VICKERS AIRCRAFT MACHINE GUN, MODEL 1918, CALIBER .30.] As soon as our officers in France could make an adequate study of our aircraft needs in machine guns, they discovered that in the three years of war only one weapon had met the requirements of the allies for a fixed machine gun that could be synchronized to fire through the whirling blades of an airplane propeller. This was the Vickers gun, which was already being manufactured in some quantity in our country, and for which three months before we entered the war we had given an order amounting to 4,000 weapons. On the other hand, the fighting aircraft of Europe were also finding an increased need for machine guns of the flexible type--that is, guns mounted on universal pivots, and which could be aimed and fired in any direction by the second man, or observer, in an airplane. The best gun we had for this purpose was the Lewis machine gun.