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The Lewis gun (or Lewis automatic machine gun or Lewis automatic rifle) is a First World War–era light machine gun. Designed privately in the United States though not adopted there, the design was finalised and mass-produced in the United Kingdom, and widely used by troops of the British Empire during the war. It had a distinctive barrel cooling shroud (containing a finned, aluminium breech-to-muzzle heat sink to cool the gun barrel) and top-mounted pan magazine. The Lewis served to the end of the Korean War, and was widely used as an aircraft machine gun during both World Wars, almost always with the cooling shroud removed, as air flow during flight offered sufficient cooling. A predecessor to the Lewis gun incorporating the principles upon which it was based was designed by Ferdinand Mannlicher. The Lewis gun was invented by U.S. Army colonel Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911, based on initial work by Samuel Maclean. Despite its origins, the Lewis gun was not initially adopted by the U.S. military, most likely because of political differences between Lewis and General William Crozier, the chief of the Ordnance Department. Lewis became frustrated with trying to persuade the U.S. Army to adopt his design, claiming that he was "slapped by rejections from ignorant hacks", and retired from the army. Lewis left the United States in 1913 and went to Belgium, where he established the Armes Automatique Lewis company in Liège to facilitate commercial production of the gun. Lewis had been working closely with British arms manufacturer the Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited (BSA) in an effort to overcome some of the production difficulties of the weapon. The Belgians bought a small number of Lewis guns in 1913, using the .303 British round and, in 1914, BSA purchased a licence to manufacture the Lewis machine gun in England, which resulted in Lewis receiving significant royalty payments and becoming very wealthy. Lewis and his factory moved to England before 1914, away from possible seizure in the event of a German invasion.

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Lewis gun