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The French pilot Roland Garros had fitted nose mounted guns to his planes in 1915, simply by placing a metal wedge on the propeller to deflect the bullets. After a particularly successful month in which German aircraft were shot down in increasing numbers, his plane was forced down in German territory in April 1915 and the mystery was revealed.
Heinrich Lübbe, an engineer working for Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker, felt Garros' solution was particularly poor, and set about inventing a better one. According to some accounts, Fokker's team were given the problem on a Tuesday evening and presented a working system on Friday. Lübbe's solution was a cam attached to the propeller shaft that pressed on a long rod running to the trigger of the guns. The cam was set such that the propeller was horizontal when it pushed on the rod, and the rod in turn pressed the trigger to fire a bullet. The trigger operated by the pilot pulled the rod into position over the cam. The interrupter gear was demonstrated on a Fokker M.5 k monoplane.The system was immediately fitted to the production Fokker E.I monoplane — essentially an armed M.5k — and the first victory was achieved on 1 July, 1915 which marked the beginning of the Fokker Scourge. The interrupter gear was soon copied by all air forces and remained widely used until the jet engine replaced propeller-driven fighters.
As aircraft gunsight technology improved, however, the importance of locating the guns in front of the pilot diminished, and many fighters of World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world, involving the great majority of the world's nations, being fought simultaneously in several major theatres, and costing tens of millions of lives. The war was fough had wing-mounted guns instead that simply fired to the sides of the propeller.
World War I aviation Machine guns