Gatling gun

Gatling gun, hand-driven machine gun, the first to solve the problems of loading, reliability, and the firing of sustained bursts. It was invented about 1862 by Richard Jordan Gatling during the American Civil War.

After early experiments with a single barrel using paper cartridges (which had to have a separate percussion cap), he saw in the newly invented brass cartridge (which had its own percussion cap) an opportunity to fashion a truly rapid-fire weapon. Gatling contrived a cluster of 10 barrels, each of which, when rotated by a crank, was loaded and fired once during a complete rotation. The barrels were loaded by gravity and the camming action of the cartridge container, located directly above the gun. Each barrel was loaded and fired during a half-rotation around the central shaft, and the spent cases were ejected during the second half-rotation.

The Gatling gun was without equal in the era of hand-operated machine guns, and Gatling continued to improve and champion it. According to an essay by Gatling published in 1884 in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, for example, a “new improvement” to the gun’s feed meant that it could “be fired at the rate of over 1200 shots per minute, and at all degrees of elevation or depression, which is something no other machine-gun can do.”

The original Gatling gun and all other hand-operated machine guns were made obsolete by the development of recoil- and gas-operated guns that followed the invention of smokeless gunpowder. The term Gatling gun continues to be applied to modern weapons that are called rotary cannons and automatic cannons, among other names.