Gatling machine gun: The silent "man-eater".

Test-firing a Gatling machine gun that is over 100 years old.

In 1718, when most of the world was still using flintlock guns or similar firearms, James Puckle introduced a strangely shaped weapon. Puckle's gun was a novel single-barreled gun that was manually loaded at the breech and came with a rotating nine-tube magazine. The shooter could rotate the magazine by hand to load and fire each tube sequentially.

Although Puckl's machine gun performed quite well in a test firing in 1722, with a soldier firing 63 rounds in 7 minutes—an incredible feat at the time—it was deemed impractical and achieved no commercial success. Nevertheless, Puckl's machine gun can still be considered the ancestor of modern machine guns.

A line of guns and bursts of bullets

The advancements in science and technology in the 19th century brought about three technological revolutions that ultimately made "automatic" firearms more feasible than in Puckl's time: primer ignition, integrated cartridges, and breech loading.

These inventions gradually enabled shooters to fire a gun quickly and steadily. For example, in 1857, James Lillie introduced a 12-barrel gun, each barrel having a multi-chamber revolving magazine with a rotating cover at the rear.

Other gun designs began to appear during the American Civil War, including the Billinghurst-Requa 25-barrel horizontal rack gun and the Ager "Coffee Mill." The Ager was a single-barreled gun that used ammunition loaded into a funnel, utilizing gravity to feed the bullet into the chamber.

The Bontigny Mitrailleuse machine gun, invented by a Belgian, played a crucial role; it was adopted by the French army in 1870 as the first official machine gun in their inventory.

This gun has a minimum of 37 barrels, loaded by a steel plate holding 37 rounds, and the rounds are fired by a separate breech block with 37 firing pins. Turning the gun's handle fires the rounds sequentially, with a practical rate of fire of approximately 150 rounds per minute.

This system worked quite well, but the French used it with the wrong tactics, employing this machine gun as artillery fire and... fighting against Prussian artillery. The result, of course, was that the real artillery completely destroyed the French machine guns.

New damage level

Therefore, the title of the first truly effective hand-operated machine gun was awarded to this weapon.Gatling machine gunRichard Jordan Gatling is famous for his Gatling gun. He began developing it in 1861 and perfected it in 1864. The Gatling gun used multiple barrels (about 10 barrels), each with its own chamber, arranged in a circle around a central axis.

When the shooter turns the hand crank on the side of the gun, the barrel rotates with it. When rotated to the top position, each barrel is loaded with a centrally positioned primer round from a 240-round cylindrical magazine, and then fired when the barrel rotates down to the bottom position (6 o'clock).

During the next 180-degree rotation, the spent cartridge case will be ejected, and the chamber will be ready to receive a new bullet. All the shooter needs to do to keep the gun firing continuously is to turn the crank.

Gatling gunThe US military introduced the machine gun in 1866 with two calibers: 12.7 mm and 25.4 mm. It was later sold worldwide in various barrel types and designs. This machine gun was groundbreaking in many respects. It could maintain a firing rate of approximately 400 rounds per minute, and the multi-barrel design controlled the problem of barrel overheating after prolonged firing, a common issue with earlier machine gun models.

This gun is reliable, rarely jams, and, more importantly, it has proven its capabilities on many battlefields and in various conflicts, from the British colonial wars in Africa to the Russian conflicts in Central Asia.

At the Battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War (1898), three Gatling guns fired 18,000 rounds in just 3.5 minutes at Spanish positions. When facing opponents not equipped with similar weapons, the destructive power of the Gatling gun was extremely dangerous.

This image shows the Maxim machine gun, the dethroner of the Gatling gun on the modern battlefield. The Maxim held its dominant position from the early 19th century until the end of World War II. Image source: Pinterest

However, the Gatling gun eventually became obsolete in the final years of the 19th century, replaced by the first true machine gun (i.e., a self-loading machine gun with only one barrel) called the Maxim. Nevertheless, the principle of the rotary machine gun persists to this day in electrically powered weapons such as the American Gatling gun and the Soviet AK-630 automatic cannon.

Essentially, the Gatling gun demonstrated the principles and effectiveness of automatic weapons, thereby increasing lethality on the battlefield.