In the mid 1830s a machine gun was designed by a Swiss called John Steuble, who tried to sell it to the Russian, English and French governments. The English and Russian governments showed interest but the former refused to pay Steuble, who later sued them for this transgression, and the latter tried to imprison him. The French government showed interest at first and while they noted that mechanically there was nothing wrong with Steuble's invention they turned him down, stating that the machine both lacked novelty and could not be usefully employed by the army. The gun was reportedly breech-loading, fed by cartridges from some kind of hopper and could fire 34 barrels of one-inch calibre 4 or 6 times for a total of 136 or 204 shots a minute.