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The Gatling Gun
by Steven Wilson, 2005

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT MILITARY.COM, October 31, 2005

It was a very simple concept; concentrate a tremendous amount of firepower against the enemy. Napoleon understood this quite well even if he did not understand that wintering in Russia was a bad idea.

Before the devilish creation of an Indianapolis dentist named Richard J. Gatling made its debut during the Civil War, men had been trying to make machines that contributed to the volume of firepower poured against their foe. Da Vinci was such an inventor, of course; James Puckle, Billinghurst, and Ezra Ripley of New York. Ripley also toyed with the idea of a vertical revolving battery mounted aboard Union vessels. Each of these had some merit but usually the merit was never enough to overcome the limitations placed on the devices by mechanical defects, design flaws, or troublesome ammunition. The Ager or Mills gun is an excellent example of promise never realized. Cumbersome, prone to jam or breakdown and limited by its construction to deployment, the Ager gun (commonly known as the Coffee Mill Gun) was used in combat during the Civil War and looked formidable enough with its long barrel flanked by ammunition chests. Looks can be deceiving however and although its service continued throughout the war, the Ager gun was not the success that its creators had intended. Its hopper arrangement to dispense ammunition to the firing mechanism did present potential.

If you believe Richard Jordan Gatling’s obituary, he invented his multi-firing weapon for humanitarian reasons—he hoped to reduce the carnage on the battlefield by shortening the length of a war or eliminating it. Or, you may choose to take the position that the good doctor did in a letter to a relative in which he stated the reason that he invented the gun was to kill Rebels. Not in so many words of course, but he fully intended to invent a weapon to be used against Southern forces that would “enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred.”

What Gatling had to be able to do in his design is address some of the difficulties that caused other multi-firing weapons to fail. One problem was resolved by adding revolving barrels. The Gatling gun was not the first weapon to use multiple barrels. The Montigny Mitrailleuse, Ripley’s Machine Gun, and the Requa Battery Gun all had more than one barrel. But the barrels were stationary and the guns were firing blocks of black powder ammunition encased in paper cartridges. That and the gun’s exposure to the elements caused frequent jamming.

Gatling’s solution was to utilize revolving barrels—four on some early models, six on most Gatling guns, so that each barrel had an opportunity to cool as it revolved. Numerous rounds passed rapidly through a rifled barrel cause a tremendous heat build-up. Revolution was achieved with a hand crank and the motion fired the fired the weapon at the same time. Originally, Gatling thought to enclose the barrels and introduce a coolant, like the water jackets of some World War II heavy machine guns; but decided against it.

The limited training sometimes accorded the men responsible for servicing and maintaining these complex machines further hampered the gun’s effectiveness. Another concept that seemed to have escaped early inventors was gun traversing. Even in the day of massed troops engaged in set-piece battles, it was possible to direct infantry fire from the front to an oblique angle; the order need simply be given to do so. Early machine guns had this capability (covering a field of fire horizontally), by rotating a wheel; thereby swinging the barrel (or barrels), in one direction or another. The Ripley, Ager or Mitrailleuse guns were ideal weapons (performance aside) to cover bridges, roads, or narrow lanes of attack in a limited field of fire. If only the enemy were so obliging.

Gatling’s earliest guns had the same difficulty and provided no ready method of lateral fire. Big, cumbersome, and mounted on re-cycled cannon carriages, these guns fired .58 caliber rim fire cartridges or 1-inch rounds with the capability of firing canister. Later the army specified .50 caliber and 1-inch barrels. It wasn’t until 1871 that the heavy wood carriage was replaced with an all-metal Broadwell carriage, which was considerably lighter than an artillery carriage. The traversing problem was also addressed with a device that automatically swung the barrels from side to side giving it a 12-degree sweep at 1,200 yards. At that distance one Gatling gun could cover a front of 62 feet.

Interest by the United States army was mixed when Gatling first presented his gun to them for inspection in 1862. Brigadier-General J.W. Ripley (no relation to Ezra), Chief of Ordnance was cool to the idea of yet another fanciful weapon that did nothing more than waste his time. He made his position quite clear to Gatling’s kind; soldiers squander ammunition if given a chance to shoot more than three times a minute. He had difficulty making sure that he had enough proper firearms and ammunition to equip the troops without adding an untried weapon to the lot. This, despite the fact that the weapon possessed, at least according to one general officer, “much merit.”

Untried or not, one Union general was going to give the Gatling gun a chance. Benjamin Butler was a political general, the bane of Lincoln and every professional soldier in the army. His politics before, during, and after the war were for the benefit of Benjamin Butler and he had achieved some notoriety in occupied Louisiana, coming away with the sobriquet “The Beast of New Orleans.” He purchased 12 of the guns from Gatling’s partner for $1,000.00, and “fired them himself upon the rebels. They created great consternation.” Whether Butler got close enough to any rebels that could shoot back so that he could fire these new guns himself, requires examination. And according to Gatling he invested his own money in the initial production of the guns and received little compensation, so, although $12,000 seems like windfall, it did little to offer hope to Gatling that his gun had found an audience. Two things worked against Gatling in marketing his gun to the U.S. military: the regular army simply had no interest in exotic machines, and the war was drawing to a close. To be fair to those in power who believed that you went to war with the army that you have, they had been scrambling for sometime to find the materials and weapons to fight a large-scale traditional war. What the Gatling gun introduced was another level of specialization that many army general officers felt that they could not afford to support.

The Union navy’s attitude was somewhat different. They ordered that tests be conducted at the Navy Ordnance Yard in Washington D.C., under the direction of Lieutenant J.S. Skerrett, who reported: “The gun or battery has stood the limited test given it admirably; [and] has proved itself to be a very effective arm at short ranges.” Skerrett did recommend a change in the rifling of the barrels, which later gave the Gatling gun target penetration roughly equal to a Springfield rifled musket. Skerrett’s 1863 report to Admiral John A. Dahlgren was generally complimentary of the workmanship and service capabilities of the gun and recommended that it be considered for employment by the navy. Unfortunately, the guns could not be produced in quantity and it appears that of the few that were requisitioned, only Admiral David Dixon Porter received this remarkable new weapon.

A year later Gatling sent a letter to President Abraham Lincoln, trying to interest the commander-in-chief in his weapon. Surprisingly, Lincoln did not respond. The president had always been fascinated by technology, often stopping while on the circuit to examine farm machinery. The president also had several inventions to his name, including one for which he had received a patent. And he and Dahlgren often discussed innovative weapons, such as the U.S.S. Monitor. But Richard J. Gatling was left to fend for himself in finding support and interest in the gun that he invented. It would be several years before both the army and navy armed themselves with the Gatling gun, and before foreign powers realized its potential. The life span of the gun was about three decades; after that it was overtaken by technology, forcing it deep into the recesses of history as a quaint device that foreshadowed modern war. The Gatling gun saw a re-emergence, however, in 1949 when a Model 1883 gun was used in an experiment. The problem was how to produce a gun that could fire a minimum of 1,000 rounds a minute. At that rate of course, barrels would wear out in no time: unless the fire was sustained through multiple barrels—such as the principle of the Gatling gun. After a series of tests, modifications and seven years of hard work, the M61, 20mm Vulcan Gun was created. This descendent of the Gatling gun would have amazed Richard Gatling—it was capable of firing 7,200 rounds a minute with a muzzle velocity of 3,380 feet per second. It still had six barrels but an electric drive motor had replaced the hand crank.

So the Gatling gun, despite a rocky beginning, served the 19th Century American military well, and found, through evolution, continued contribution to the modern military.

Steven Wilson / HuntersAndTheHunted.Com E-Mail: readermail@HuntersAndTheHunted.Com