There were many unsuccessful or impractical attempts to create a rapid-fire weapon from the early 18th century to the early 20th century before, in 1905, C. M. Clarke secured a US patent for the first fully automatic, gas-operated gun of the rotary-chamber type, but this design was ignored at the time as it appeared just as reciprocating-action automatic weapons such as the Maxim, Vickers and Browning water-cooled machine guns had been perfected and were becoming very popular in the world’s more advanced armies.