WHEN THE BAMBOO “HAND CANNON” was invented in China around 1250, its creators had no idea the crude weapon someday would revolutionize warfare. From that first invention came


muskets and cannons and, later, pistols and rifles. But until the mid-19th century, guns shot single projectiles, one at a time. After the Civil War began in 1861, however, a man named Richard Gatling patented an invention that represented a quantum leap in the evolution of firearms.


Gatling was born on a farm in Hartford County, N.C., in 1818 and followed in his father’s footsteps as an inventor. After earning a medical degree in 1850, he moved to Cincinnati, where he lived near a railroad station. There he saw the bodies of Civil War soldiers returning from the battlefield, and he noted more of them had died from illness than from bullet wounds.


A weapon to end them all
The sight sparked an idea: Gatling would create a weapon so devastating and superior in its firepower that opposing armies would have no chance of victory. In an 1877 letter to the niece of Samuel Colt, 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 [would] be greatly diminished.”


Gatling’s first gun had six barrels, which fired .58-caliber minié balls, connected to a gearing system with a hand crank. In the spring of 1862, Gatling demonstrated his gun in Indianapolis before thousands of people, including Army representatives and the governor of Indiana.


62 MILITARY OFFICER APRIL 2012

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