Gatling Machine Gun: The Silent “Cannibal”

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

In 1718, when most of the world was still using muskets and similar guns, James Puckle introduced a strange-looking gun. Puckle’s gun was a new type of single-barrel gun that was hand-loaded at the rear of the barrel and came with a nine-tube rotating magazine. The shooter could rotate the magazine with his hand to load and fire each tube in succession.

Although Puckl's gun performed quite well in a test firing in 1722, a soldier fired 63 bullets in 7 minutes, an unimaginable number at that time, it was considered impractical and did not achieve any commercial success. However, Puckl's gun can still be considered the forefather of today's machine guns.

Guns and bullets

The development of science and technology in the 19th century brought about three technological revolutions that eventually made "automatic" firearms more feasible than in Puckl's time: flintlock, solid bullets, and muzzle loading.

These inventions gradually made it possible for the shooter to fire a gun quickly and consistently. For example, in 1857, James Lillie introduced a 12-barrel gun, each barrel containing a multi-chamber revolver-style magazine, with a rotating handle at the rear.

Other designs began to appear during the American Civil War, including the 25-barrel Billinghurst-Requa cross-barrel gun and the Ager "Coffee Mill." The Ager was a single-barrel gun that used a pre-capped hopper that used gravity to feed the bullet into the chamber.

The Bontigny Mitrailleuse machine gun was invented by a Belgian and played a more important role, it was put into use by the French army in 1870 as the first official machine gun in the French army.

The gun had at least 37 barrels, loaded with a steel plate that held 37 rounds, and fired by a separate breech containing 37 firing pins. Turning the handle of the gun would fire each round in turn, with an actual rate of fire of about 150 rounds per minute.

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

New damage level

Thus the title of the first truly effective manually operated machine gun was given to theGatling gunRichard Jordan Gatling's infamous gun. He began developing it in 1861 and completed it in 1864. The Gatling gun used multiple barrels (about 10 barrels), each with its own chamber, the barrels arranged in a circle rotating around a central axis.

As the shooter rotates the hand crank on the side of the gun, the barrel rotates. When rotated to the top position, each barrel is loaded with a center-fired round from a 240-round cylindrical magazine, which is then fired when the barrel rotates to the bottom (6 o'clock) position.

The next 180 degrees of rotation will eject the shell casing and the chamber will be ready to receive a new bullet. All the shooter needs to do to keep the gun firing is to turn the crank.

Gatling gunThe machine gun was adopted by the US Army in 1866 in two calibers, 12.7 mm and 25.4 mm. It was later sold all over the world in many different calibers and designs. This gun was groundbreaking in many ways. It could maintain a rate of fire of about 400 rounds per minute, and the multiple barrel arrangement controlled the problem of barrel overheating after a period of firing in previous machine guns.

The gun was reliable, rarely jammed, and more importantly, it had proven its worth on many battlefields and in many different conflicts, from British colonial wars in Africa, to 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 faced with opponents not equipped with similar weapons, the destructive power of this Gatling gun was extremely dangerous.

Image of the Maxim machine gun, the one that replaced the Gatling on the modern battlefield, Maxim held its unique position from the beginning of the 19th century until the end of World War II. Photo source: Pinterest

However, the Gatling gun was quickly made obsolete in the last years of the 19th century by the first true machine gun (that is, self-loading with only one barrel) called the Maxim. However, the principle of the rotating barrel machine gun still exists today in electric weapons from the American Gatling gun to the Soviet AK-630 automatic cannon.

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