Mitrailleuse
A mitrailleuse (; from French "mitraille", "grapeshot") is a type of volley gun with multiple barrels of rifle calibre that can fire either multiple rounds at once or several rounds in rapid succession. The earliest true mitrailleuse was invented in 1851 by Belgian Army captain Fafschamps, 10 years before the advent of the Gatling gun. It was followed by the Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse in 1863. Then the French 25 barrel ""Canon à Balles"", better known as the Reffye "mitrailleuse", was adopted in great secrecy in 1866. It became the first rapid-firing weapon deployed as standard equipment by any army in a major conflict when it was used during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. A steel block containing twenty-five 13 mm (.51 calibre) centre-fire cartridges was locked against the breech before firing. With the rotation of a crank, the 25 rounds were discharged in rapid succession. The sustainable firing rate of the Reffye mitrailleuse was 100 rounds per minute. The maximum effective range of the Reffye "mitrailleuse" was about 2000 yards; a distance which placed their batteries beyond the reach of Prussian Dreyse needle rifle fire. Reffye mitrailleuses were deployed in six gun batteries and were manned by artillery personnel. They were not infantry support weapons, but rather a form of special artillery.
Mark Serrurier
Mark Serrurier (12 May 1904 in Pasadena, California – 14 February 1988) is the son of Dutch-born electrical engineer, Iwan Serrurier, who created the Moviola in 1924 which became the technology used for film editing. Mark was a graduate of Caltech and went on to work on designs for the Mt. Palomar 200 inch (5 m) Hale telescope. The pioneering truss design he invented for that instrument's massive tube structure (the "Serrurier truss") is still used today in large telescope designs. During World War II, Mark worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory testing jet aircraft engines. In 1942, Rolf Sabersky worked in mechanical design on the Southern California Cooperative Wind Tunnel under Serrurier and Hap Richards.
After the war in 1946 Mark took over as president of Moviola Co., his father Iwan’s company. Mark re-designed his fathers invention with many improvements and ran the company until he sold it in 1966. In 1979, Mark accepted a special Academy Award for Technical Achievement"" For the progressive development of the Moviola from the 1924 invention of his father, Iwan Serrurier, to the present Series 20 sophisticated film editing equipment"". He only accepted after insisting that his late father's name would also appear on the statue. The Oscar sat on Mark's kitchen table until his death from Alzheimer's disease on Valentine's Day 1988.