Richard Jordan Gatling - Gatling Gun

Gatling Gun

Gatling invented the Gatling gun after he noticed that a majority of the soldiers fighting in the Civil War were lost to disease rather than gunshots. In 1877, he wrote:

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.

The gun was based on Gatling’s seed planter. A working prototype was developed in 1861. In 1862, he founded the Gatling Gun Company in Indianapolis, Indiana to market the gun. The first 6 production guns were destroyed during a fire in December 1862 at the factory. All 6 of them had been manufactured at Gatling's expense. Undaunted, Gatling arranged for another 13 to be manufactured at the Cincinnati Type Factory.

Though the gun was developed during the Civil War, it saw very little action. This is partly because Gatling was accused of being a copperhead because of his North Carolina roots, but this was never proven. Gatling was never affiliated with the Confederate States government or military, nor did he live in the South during the Civil War. {5} Although General Benjamin F. Butler bought 12 and Admiral David Dixon Porter bought one, it wasn't until 1866 that the US Government officially purchased Gatling Guns. In 1870 he sold his patents for the Gatling gun to Colt. Gatling remained president of the Gatling Gun Company until it was fully absorbed by Colt in 1897.

The hand-cranked Gatling gun was declared obsolete by the United States Army in 1911. Decades later, after World War 2, the mechanical concept was resurrected and wedded to electricity-driven cranking in the M61 Vulcan.