During the difficulties on the Mexican border the United States secured from the Savage Arms Co. several hundred Lewis guns made to use British ammunition. In order to be sure that the guns would be properly used, experts from the factory were sent out to instruct the troops who were to receive the guns. Ordnance officers also went out on this instruction work and established machine-gun schools along the border. The troops did not find the guns entirely satisfactory, in spite of expert instruction that they received from men from the factory. The trouble with the guns at this time was due to the fact that the company making them in the United States had been engaged in the manufacture of machine guns for a short time only and had run into several minor difficulties in the design and manufacture, difficulties which caused considerable trouble in operating the guns in the field, and which were subsequently corrected in the 15 changes mentioned above. The machine-gun schools which were established on the border taught not only the mechanism of the Lewis gun, but also those of the other types of guns with which the various troops were armed. The first thing that these schools developed was the fact that much of the trouble which had been encountered in machine guns was undoubtedly due to the fact that our soldiers were unfamiliar with the operation of the weapons. In fact, at that time we had few experts in the operation of any make of machine guns. Soon after the establishment of machine-gun schools on the border it became apparent that the system of instruction devised by our ordnance officers had gone a long way toward overcoming the difficulties which the Army had encountered in the use of machine guns. The advantage of these schools was so marked that on the outbreak of the war with Germany the Ordnance Department established a machine-gun school at Springfield Armory. The first class of this school consisted of a large number of technical graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other such schools. These men were employed as civilians, and were taught the mechanism of machine guns in a theoretical way in as thorough a manner as could possibly be done, and were given an opportunity to fire the guns and find out for themselves just what troubles were likely to occur. Many of these men were afterwards commissioned as officers in the Ordnance Department and were sent to the various cantonments throughout the United States to establish schools of instruction in the mechanism of the various machine guns.