The origin of the Thompson submachine gun and its prototype Thompson submachine gun (thompson submachine gun), commonly known as the Tommy gun. Due to different transliterations, our country once called the Thompson submachine gun. John Taliaferro Thompson is a retired U.S. lieutenant general who serves as the manager of Automatic Weapons Co., Ltd. He played a promoting role in the development of the gun, but is not the inventor of the gun. The Thompson submachine gun was invented and designed by O.V. Payne and T.H. Eickhoff, technicians of the Automatic Weapons Co., Ltd. These two technicians were Thomson's collaborators in conducting experiments with the M1911 semi-automatic pistol during his time at the arsenal (1909-1914). In the development of the submachine gun, they received directional guidance from Manager Thomson and help in smoothing production and sales. Therefore, the Automatic Weapons Company named the submachine gun after General Thomson. The automatic weapons company's submachine gun was first patented in 1920. Therefore, it is certain that the company's earliest submachine gun was produced in 1918, although the No. 1 prototype Thompson submachine gun (Figure 1) displayed in the U.S. Army Academy Museum at West Point has no manufacturing number and manufacturing year mark. The structure of the No. 1 prototype was quite different from that of later Tom guns. Its main feature is the use of belt ammunition. The ammunition is loaded on a cloth belt, which is then loaded into the magazine. The ratchet wheel located on the right side of the receiver rotates, driving the ammunition to be fed along the inclined groove of the loading handle. Although the M1918 prototype submachine gun retains the burst shooting performance of ordinary machine guns, it still cannot reflect the advantages of submachine guns in terms of portability and operational performance.