Gatling gun

Origins

Richard Jordan Gatling was a North Carolina-born inventor of farm machinery living in Indianapolis when the American Civil War began. He reasoned that a gun which let one man do the work of a hundred would reduce the size of armies and so reduce deaths from disease and battle. He patented his battery gun on 4 November 1862. The first six guns were destroyed in a factory fire, and the Union Ordnance Department, wary of Gatling's Southern birth and of the gun's paper cartridges, declined to buy it. General Benjamin Butler bought twelve on his own authority and used them in the Petersburg lines in 1864. The Model 1865 moved to .58 rimfire cartridges, and the Army did not formally adopt the Gatling until 1866, after the war had ended, in .50 and 1-inch calibers.

Design & Construction

The Gatling was not an automatic weapon. A gunner turned a hand crank, which rotated a cluster of six or ten barrels around a central shaft. Each barrel had its own bolt and firing pin, and as the cluster turned a cam track drove each bolt forward to chamber a round, fire it and then draw back to extract the empty case, so the barrels loaded, fired and ejected in turn. Because each barrel fired only once per revolution the gun did not overheat, and a steady hand on the crank gave several hundred rounds a minute. Feeding was the weak point. The earliest models took loose cartridges from a gravity hopper. The Broadwell drum of the early 1870s stacked twenty vertical columns of rounds in a rotating carrier, and the Accles drum of 1883 used a spiral feed that let the gun fire at any elevation. The Model 1874 in .45-70 Government had ten 32-inch barrels, a bronze breech housing and, on many guns, a brass barrel jacket. The gun alone weighed roughly 200 pounds before it went onto its two-wheeled field carriage or a naval pedestal mount. Short-barreled Camel guns and the five-barrel Model 1877 Bulldog served cavalry and colonial forces.

Combat Use

Britain bought Gatlings for the Royal Navy and the Army in the 1870s. Naval Brigade landing parties fought with them at Gingindlovu in April 1879, and two Royal Artillery guns stood in the square at Ulundi on 4 July 1879, the closing battle of the Anglo-Zulu War. They jammed more than once, but when running they cut down the Zulu rushes at close range. In the US Army the gun sat at frontier posts, and Custer left his Gatlings behind in 1876 because they slowed his column. Its finest hour came at San Juan Hill on 1 July 1898, when Lieutenant John H. Parker's Gatling Gun Detachment brought three Model 1895 guns in .30-40 Krag into action and swept the Spanish trenches on the crest, covering the advance of the infantry and dismounted cavalry.

Legacy

The Gatling's dependence on a man turning a crank was its limit. Hiram Maxim's recoil-operated Maxim Gun of 1884 fired itself from a belt, and by 1900 the Gatling was clearly outclassed. Gatling himself fitted an electric motor to a gun in 1893 and reached about 3,000 rounds a minute, but the Army had no use for it, and the US Army declared its Gatlings obsolete in 1911. Its French contemporary, the Reffye Mitrailleuse of 1866, was a volley gun, and the Franco-Prussian War showed the limits of both when handled as artillery at long range. Yet the rotating-barrel principle returned when heat and rate of fire became the problem again. General Electric's Project Vulcan, begun in 1946, produced the 20mm M61 Vulcan cannon for jet aircraft, electrically driven at 6,000 rounds a minute, and the 7.62mm M134 Minigun of the 1960s armed helicopters and gunships in Vietnam. Among Machine Guns it stands as the first mechanical gun that really worked.