On This Day In History, November 4th 1862 - The Gatling Gun Patented
The Gatling Gun Patented The first commercially successful machine gun emerged November 4th 1862.
Attempts to make a machine gun go a long way back. An Englishman called James Puckle demonstrated a rapid-firing gun in 1718 and announced he could provide ordinary round bullets for killing Christians and more painful square ones for slaughtering Muslims, to teach them the advantages of civilisation, but the gun failed to sell. Various types of so-called battery gun were developed later, with numerous barrels on a wheeled mounting. Things improved, if that is the right word, with the introduction of cartridges that held the propellant, the primer and the bullet all in one. They were quicker to load and speeded up the rate of fire.
The first commercially successful machine gun was invented in the United States by Richard Jordan Gatling. Though not without problems, it was more reliable than its predecessors, faster to load and could fire sustained bursts with less overheating. The first model had six barrels, which rotated round a central axis. The ammunition was held in a drum on top of the machine, which automatically loaded each barrel, fired a round and ejected the cartridge case. Each barrel fired once in a full rotation. In a test in 1870 a Gatling fired 1,925 rounds in two and a half minutes.
