This remarkable mouthful of chem-speak was the first plastic material made from synthetic components, a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin. Bakelite is a polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. In place of wooden furniture the MP38’s designers used synthetic Bakelite. The basic weapon feeds from a vertically-mounted 32-round box magazine and features a radical underfolding steel stock. The two guns look about the same in dim light, but the MP40 was markedly easier to manufacture en masse. There were a few other fundamental differences between the MP38 and the MP40, but normal people don’t care. The subsequent MP40 that would come was a very similar weapon, but the receiver was formed from stamped steel that was easy to produce in large quantities by semi-skilled workers. The receiver featured a series of longitudinal grooves along its length, and the magazine well sported a hole in each side about the size of a dime. The MP40 saw service with all branches of the German military during World War II. Where previous weapons were nearly two meters long with their extraordinary sword bayonets and cycled laboriously via a manual bolt action, the full-auto MP38 spit 9mm bullets like a garden hose and maneuvered indoors faster than a toddler on Sugar Babies. This pistol-caliber submachine gun changed the way grunts managed their battlespace. The MP38 hit the streets in, you guessed it, 1938. The subsequent MP38 was built around a machined steel receiver. This radical weapon did not survive beyond prototype stage, but in it you could see the beginnings of something quite familiar. The MP40 was an evolutionary development of the original MP36. In no place was this axiom better manifest than in the German MP40. Where previously infantry weapons were all forged, milled, sawn and sanded, now it was time for something more institutional. Engineers, politicians and industrialists alike had an awakening. In the interstitial space between World Wars I and II, something insidious happened. It inspired generations of follow-on designs. The German MP40 was the world’s first mass-produced infantry weapon truly optimized for ease of production. Such a cumbersome ethos even carried us through the expansive First War to End All Wars. Artisans crafted the implements of chaos, sometimes in simply breathtaking quantities, such that they still incorporated a measure of individual skill. Even in the Industrial Age there yet remained a great deal of weapons production that involved a human touch. In the age of the gun they were typical conjured from steel and walnut and fastidiously fitted. For millennia, a man’s weapons were intimate things, meticulously crafted by hand and imbued with a singular dark purpose.
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