The Various Maxim Gun British Maxim MG 08 #5 is a WW2 first produced in 1939. It carries a scarcity score of 86/100 based on tracked survey data, with 11 active listings currently on the secondary market and a global benchmark price of $61,736.
This Maxim-pattern machine gun represents the water-cooled automatic weapon family descended from Hiram Maxim's original 1884 design, the first machine gun to use the recoil energy of firing to reload and fire continuously. Maxim's toggle-lock mechanism became the foundation for numerous national variants adopted before and during the First World War, including Germany's MG 08 and Britain's Vickers gun, both refined from Maxim's basic operating principle. These guns defined the tactical role of sustained, belt-fed automatic fire in early twentieth-century warfare, fundamentally altering infantry tactics through their ability to deliver overwhelming, continuous fire from fixed positions. Though largely superseded by lighter air-cooled designs by the Second World War, surviving Maxim-pattern guns illustrate the direct lineage connecting nineteenth-century automatic weapons development to later machine gun designs.
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