[1] The earliest mention of recoil used to assist the loading of firearms is sometimes claimed to be in 1663 when an Englishman called Palmer proposed to employ either it or gases tapped along a barrel to do so.

[2] However no one has been able to verify this claim in recent times, although there is another automatic gun that dates from the same year, but its type and method of operation are unknown.

[3] Recoil-operation, if it was invented in 1663, would then lie dormant until the 19th century, when a number of inventors started to patent designs featuring recoil operation; this was due to the fact that the integrated disposable cartridge (both bullet and propellant in one easily interchangeable unit) made these designs viable.

[4] Around this time, an American by the name of Regulus Pilon is sometimes stated to have patented in Britain a gun that used a limited form of recoil operation.

[5] In 1864 after the Second Schleswig War, Denmark started a program intended to develop a gun that used the recoil of a fired shot to reload the firearm, though a working model would not be produced until 1888.

[6] Later in the 1870s, a Swedish captain called D. H. Friberg patented a design which introduced both flapper-locking and the fully automatic recoil operated machine gun.

Similarly the use of blank ammunition will typically cause the mechanism not to work correctly, unless a device is fitted to boost the recoil.

The barrel stops quickly, and the bolt continues rearward, compressing the recoil spring and performing the automated extraction and feeding process.

The method of locking and unlocking the barrel differentiates the wide array of short recoil designs.

Vladimirov also used the short recoil principle in the Soviet KPV-14.5 heavy machine gun which has been in service with the Russian military and Middle Eastern armed forces since 1949.

[11] An alternative design concept for recoil-operated firearms is the inertia operated system, the first practical use of it being the Sjögren shotgun, developed by Carl Axel Theodor Sjögren in the early 1900s, a Swedish engineer who was awarded a number of patents for his inertia operated design between 1900 and 1908 and sold about 5,000 automatic shotguns using the system in 1908–1909.

[12][13] In a reversal of the other designs, some inertia systems use nearly the entire firearm as the recoiling component, with only the bolt remaining stationary during firing.

Then the Browning Arms Company introduced the inertia-operated A5 (trademarked as Kinematic Drive) as successor to the long-recoil operated Auto-5.

As the recoil spring returns to its uncompressed state, it pushes the bolt body backward with sufficient force to cycle the action.