In 1861, the year the Civil War broke out, Dr. Richard J. Gatling decided to create a weapon that "made war so horrible that it would end wars." His famous design, the Gatling gun, was created with the hopes of "[reducing] the size of armies and so reduce the number of deaths by combat and disease, and to show that war is futile." By 1866, when the gun was finally adopted by the United States Army, the combat the gun did see made it one of the most valuable tools in the military arsenal, and ultimately displayed how easy war could be, not how futile it is.
The Gatling gun was designed as the first "machine gun," but due to its manual hand crank it was outdone by the Maxim gun. However, it was still a huge leap in firearm technology at the time, adapting technology from and outdoing other weapons, such as the Pucker gun (rotating chamber mechanism) and the French-Belgian mitrailleuse (multi-barrel system) and drastically changing the course of the Civil War, perhaps even ushering the end of the bloody conflict.
In its own way, the Gatling was quite innovative: it took the rotating chamber/cylinder mechanism of the Pucker gun and the muti-barrel firing system of the mitrailleuse & combined them. The Gatling gun had 6 barrels that rotated around a central shaft, and instead of a breech (loading area/ejection port) the rounds were fed into each barrel through a gravity-fed hopper above the barrels. This gave the arm a high rate of fire and gave each barrel time to cool off while it rotated, unlike single-barrel weapons. This prevented jamming and unnecessary weapon damage from overheating.
The Gatling gun was capable of dishing out 600 .58-caliber (.58 inch) rounds per minute - extremely fast for the Civil War - making it the fastest hand-cranked or manual weapon available until the true automatic Maxim gun came about in 1884, making the Gatling obsolete. It weighed approximately 60 lbs. and was mobilized by 30-inch or larger cannon carriage wheels, making it extremely difficult to conceal from enemy troops or snipers hiding about. Until smokeless gunpowder was invented, the smoke created from the monster's rapid fire made any possible concealment invalid.
The gun wasn't officially adopted into the U.S. arsenal until 1866 after Gatling redesigned the weapon to weasel out some annoying glitches in 1865 when a Gatling Gun Company sales representative displayed it in combat; however, Major General Benjamin F. Butler privately purchased 12 of the spitfire machines for $1,000 a piece - a huge fortune at the time - and deployed two of them at the front for the Siege of Petersburg and, using almost 2,000 rounds of ammunition, gave the Union Army victory in under 10 minutes.
The Gatling gun was designed as the first "machine gun," but due to its manual hand crank it was outdone by the Maxim gun. However, it was still a huge leap in firearm technology at the time, adapting technology from and outdoing other weapons, such as the Pucker gun (rotating chamber mechanism) and the French-Belgian mitrailleuse (multi-barrel system) and drastically changing the course of the Civil War, perhaps even ushering the end of the bloody conflict.
In its own way, the Gatling was quite innovative: it took the rotating chamber/cylinder mechanism of the Pucker gun and the muti-barrel firing system of the mitrailleuse & combined them. The Gatling gun had 6 barrels that rotated around a central shaft, and instead of a breech (loading area/ejection port) the rounds were fed into each barrel through a gravity-fed hopper above the barrels. This gave the arm a high rate of fire and gave each barrel time to cool off while it rotated, unlike single-barrel weapons. This prevented jamming and unnecessary weapon damage from overheating.
The Gatling gun was capable of dishing out 600 .58-caliber (.58 inch) rounds per minute - extremely fast for the Civil War - making it the fastest hand-cranked or manual weapon available until the true automatic Maxim gun came about in 1884, making the Gatling obsolete. It weighed approximately 60 lbs. and was mobilized by 30-inch or larger cannon carriage wheels, making it extremely difficult to conceal from enemy troops or snipers hiding about. Until smokeless gunpowder was invented, the smoke created from the monster's rapid fire made any possible concealment invalid.
The gun wasn't officially adopted into the U.S. arsenal until 1866 after Gatling redesigned the weapon to weasel out some annoying glitches in 1865 when a Gatling Gun Company sales representative displayed it in combat; however, Major General Benjamin F. Butler privately purchased 12 of the spitfire machines for $1,000 a piece - a huge fortune at the time - and deployed two of them at the front for the Siege of Petersburg and, using almost 2,000 rounds of ammunition, gave the Union Army victory in under 10 minutes.