Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel - The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It


Product Details

    * Paperback: 320 pages
    * Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 26, 2009)
    * Language: English
    * ISBN-10: 0143115642
    * ISBN-13: 978-0143115649


From Publishers Weekly
Keller, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, analyzes the nexus between invention and culture in this incisive and instructive cultural history cum biography. Her subject is the iconic Gatling gun, the first successful machine gun, and its inventor, Richard Jordan Gatling, a 19th-century tinkerer and entrepreneur. A gifted amateur inventor, he registered his first patent—for a mechanical seed planter—in 1844 and had 43 lifetime patents. In 1862, with the Civil War raging, Gatling invented a six-barrel, rapid-firing (200 rounds per minute) gun based on his seed planter. Initially rejected by the Union army, the gun finally came into use in 1866 as a bully and enforcer against striking workers and in the Indian Wars; its legacy—the mechanization of death—didn't become fully apparent until the killing fields of WWI. A celebrity in the 19th century, Gatling was soon reviled for his terrible marvel and then consigned to obscurity. Keller rescues Gatling and anchors his remarkable life firmly in the landscape of 19th-century America: a time and place of egalitarian hope and infinite possibility.

 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun


The Gatling gun is one of the best known early rapid-fire weapons and a forerunner of the modern machine gun. It is well known for its use by the Union forces  during the American Civil War in the 1860s, which was the first time it was employed in combat. Later it was also famously used in the assault on San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War.[1]

Developed following the 1851 invention of the mitrailleuse by the Belgian Army, the Gatling gun was designed by the American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861 and patented in 1862.[2] Gatling wrote that he created it to reduce the size of armies and so reduce the number of deaths by combat and disease, and to show how futile war is.[3]

Although the first Gatling gun was capable of firing continuously, it required a person to crank it; therefore it was not a true automatic weapon. The Maxim gun, invented in 1884, was the first true fully automatic weapon, making use of the fired projectile's recoil force to reload the weapon. Nonetheless, the Gatling gun represented a huge leap in firearm technology. Prior to the Gatling gun, the only rapid-fire firearms available to militaries were mass-firing volley weapons as the mitrailleuse or grapeshot (as fired from cannons, similar to shotguns). And though rate of fire was increased by firing multiple projectiles simultaneously, these weapons still needed to be reloaded after each discharge, which for multi-barrel systems like the mitrailleuse was quite cumbersome and extremely time-consuming, thus negating their high rate of fire per discharge and making them impractical for use on the battlefield. In comparison, the Gatling gun offered a rapid continuous rate of fire without needing to manually reload.

The gun's operation centered around a cyclic multi-barrel design which facilitated cooling and synchronized the firing/reloading sequence. Each barrel fired a single shot when it reached a certain point in the cycle, after which it ejected the spent cartridge, loaded a new round, and in the process, cooled down somewhat. This configuration allowed higher rates of fire to be achieved without the barrel overheating. Some time later, Gatling-type weapons were invented that diverted a fraction of the gas pressure from the chamber to turn the barrels. Later still, electric motors supplied external power to operate the Gatling gun.