Army made its first order for 50 1-inch and 50.

army's reluctance to embrace the machine gun meant Gatling was ignored, at least at first. While the new weapon was promising, the U.S. At the time, Gatling had a difficult path even getting his weapon into the war. In hindsight, we know how flawed this logic proved to be, as the Gatling gun and later machine guns caused untold death and destruction. Gatling earned his first patent in November 1862, for the ' Improvement in revolving battery-guns,' his idea for reducing the number of men needed to fight the American Civil War. Yet this fast-firing weapon got off to a slow start. Early models fired up to 200 rounds per minute (later ones could get up to 700 to 1,000 rounds in 60 seconds)-all this while an enemy soldier in the line of fire took the same amount of time to charge and fire once. Each barrel fired with one turn of the crank, and the weapon's rate of fire was limited only by the speed at which the gunner could crank it. The Gatling featured four to 10 barrels arrayed around a central axis and a top-loading magazine which loaded each barrel in turn before the continuing turn of the gun's crank fired the weapon. Gatling would refine the basic design of his gun over its 40-year lifespan, but the basic operation remained the same.

So why does the world still know the name of gun that's been obsolete for a hundred years? Even today, a century and a half after its design, the gun retains its iconic status. In an age of slow-loading rifles, the Gatling offered unprecedented firepower. The Gatling is the most famous of late 19th century's manual machine guns and paved a way for the modern machine guns we recognize today.

Working throughout the summer of 1861, Gatling developed the invention that would carry his name though history: the Gatling gun, a weapon featuring a barrel that was 2.21 feet long and weighed a total of 170 pounds. Gatling set about inventing a 'labor-saving device for warfare' he hoped would minimize the number of men needed to fight a war, and thus minimize the number of men exposed to its horrors.ĭIVE DEEPER ➡ Read best-in-class military features and get unlimited access to Pop Mech, starting now. In the opposite direction came a never-ending stream of badly wounded men, to say nothing of those who lost their lives. In April 1861, Richard Jordan Gatling watched hundreds of Union soldiers march through Indianapolis, ready to ride the rails to the front.

Why are they called miniguns