Richard Gatling

• Born: September 12, 1818
• Birthplace: Maneys Neck Township, North Carolina
• Died: February 26, 1903
• Place of death: New York, New York

American engineer

Gatling invented the first practical machine gun, which greatly enhanced the ability of small groups in warfare to overcome larger ones.

Primary fields: Agriculture; military technology and weaponry

Primary invention: Gatling machine gun

Early Life

Richard Jordan Gatling was born in a log cabin in rural North Carolina, where he lived for his first six years. In 1824, the family moved into a two-story house built by his father, Jordan Gatling, on a large tract of land that would become a successful plantation. In 1835, his father patented a cotton planter and a rotary cultivator. Richard Gatling had six siblings: three sisters, one of whom died in infancy, and three brothers. All the boys attended primary school at Buckhorn Academy, a classical boys’ school run by a nearby church. Thereafter, he worked on the family farm. The family was well respected for its success at farming and business, although Gatling’s reclusive father was not personally popular. For a while, the young Gatling served as a clerk in the Murfreesboro law office of his uncle Lewis M. Cooper.

At age seventeen, Gatling invented a screw propeller, but his father refused to allow him travel to Washington, D.C., to file a patent claim. When his father finally relented, Gatling arrived in D.C. only to find that John Ericsson (who would eventually build the Civil War ironclad the Monitor) had been granted the screw propeller patent a few months earlier. At age nineteen, Gatling became a schoolteacher at an “old field school” (a small, primitive schoolhouse in a field or clearing). While continuing his teaching career, he opened a general merchandise store in 1840.

Gatling’s 1841 marriage to a woman from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was annulled because of the objections of the bride’s father. Gatling eventually married Jemima Sanders of Indianapolis in 1854. As a wedding gift, Gatling received a slave, Rachel Stepney, from his father-in-law. Gatling freed her, and she chose to work for the Gatlings as a cook and housekeeper for the rest of her life.

Life’s Work

Gatling’s first patent was issued in May, 1844, for a seed sower that planted in straight rows. After the patent was granted, he moved to St. Louis, where he turned the seed sower into a wheat drill and began to make a small fortune. While on a marketing trip, he contracted smallpox and spent three months in 1845-1846 in Pittsburgh in a pesthouse—a place where people with contagious illnesses were quarantined, and where they often died. He survived, and for the rest of his life he wore a beard to cover his pockmarks. In 1847-1849, he attended Indiana Medical College, and then Ohio Medical College. His purpose was not to practice medicine but simply to learn how to protect his own health.

Gatling obtained eight more agricultural patents, including a double-acting hemp break in 1847 and a rotary plow in 1861. Watching the sick and wounded returning home from the first months of the Civil War, he began work on a gun that he hoped would do the work of many soldiers and thereby reduce the number of soldiers needed. The design combined ideas from his father’s rotary cultivator and from his own seed sower: Cartridges dropped into the firing chambers from a hopper, just as seeds dropped to the ground from a hopper.

In 1718, James Puckle had patented “A Portable Gun or Machine called a Defence.” The Gatling was also preceded by the DeBrame Revolver Cannon (patented 1861), the Ager “Coffee Mill,” and various other primitive machine guns. However, Gatling’s design, patented in November, 1862, was far superior. He built a half-dozen machine guns in November-December, but the factory and all the guns were destroyed by Confederate arson. Thereafter, he made more guns at another factory, but the U.S. Army was not interested, for the chief of the U.S. Army Department of Ordnance, Brigadier General James W. Ripley, fiercely opposed new guns. Gatling was also dogged by suspicion that his factory, located in Cincinnati, aimed to sell guns to both sides in the war. Federal agents wrongly claimed that he was a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a pro-Confederate secret society.

Richard Gatling found other buyers. The New York Times bought three of his guns and used them during the July, 1863, draft riots in New York City. While other employees stood ready with rifles, the paper’s owner and editor each manned one of the Gatlings, deterring a mob that was threatening the building. Following a personal demonstration from Gatling, Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler bought twelve of the guns for $1,000 each from his personal funds. He probably used them in the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, which lasted from June, 1864, to April, 1865.

The commercial breakthrough came in 1866, when the U.S. Army ordered one hundred Gatling guns. Gatling arranged for Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company to build the guns at its Hartford factory, where all American-made Gatlings were thereafter produced. The next year, the Russians bought one hundred, along with a production license. By the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the Russians had at least 400 Gatlings. In response to Russian armament, the Ottoman military had purchased 230 from E. A. Paget, an Austrian licensee of Gatling. In 1874, the British bought a ten-barrel version. Later, the Royal Navy bought a .65-caliber model. The licensed British manufacturer, Sir William Armstrong and Co., did a thriving business with many nations.

Richard Gatling was elected the first president of the American Association of Inventors and Manufacturers in 1891 and held the post for the next six years. In 1893, he produced an electric motor-driven gun. The ten-barrel model could fire 3,000 rounds per minute, but not until the Cold War did military strategists find a practical use for such an astounding rate of fire. Gatling’s last firearms invention, in 1895, was a mechanism to use gas pressure from the gunpowder explosions to rotate the barrels. This made the Gatling machine gun into a true automatic firearm. However, the gas-powered Gatling was not adopted by any military force. The single-barreled (and therefore much lighter) automatic Maxim gun was the new weapon of choice. In 1911, the U.S. Army declared the Gatling gun obsolete, long after most other nations had done so.

Because of Gatling’s ill health and financial problems, he and his wife sold their Hartford mansion in 1897. Competition from other manufacturers, including Maxim, had reduced Gatling’s income, and his fortune had been lost to bad investments in real estate. The couple moved to St. Louis, where Gatling continued to invent. His forty-third and final patent was a motorized plow (1902). Because of his ill health, the couple went to stay with their daughter’s family in New York City. Gatling died a few weeks later, having spent the last day of his life at the offices of Scientific American, which revered Gatling as a self-taught inventive genius, and which had featured him in many articles. Among people who knew him personally, he was highly regarded for his kindness, gentleness, and decency.

Impact

Most of the world’s armies and navies bought Gatlings during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The British were especially enthusiastic and used them with great effectiveness in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War and the 1882 suppression of the Urabi Revolt in Egypt. The U.S. Army used them in Indian wars. The presence of Gatlings deterred violent resistance to the 1893 U.S. takeover of Hawaii from Queen Liliuokalani.

Gatling made the first machine gun that worked well enough to be a suitable combat weapon, but the gun’s direct impact was somewhat limited. Because Gatlings were cumbersome (usually about one thousand pounds), they were typically deployed to defend a fixed position, such as a fort or bridge. The gun also could jam, or suffer a disastrous explosion, if the gunpowder in a defective ammunition cartridge was delayed in its explosion by a fraction of a second. (This is called a “hang fire.”) By the time Gatling solved the problem in the 1890’s, the Gatling gun was already being supplanted by the automatic Maxim gun, which was immune to jamming from a hang fire.

During the Spanish-American War, U.S. lieutenant John Henry Parker figured out how to use Gatlings offensively: using one gun to support the advance of the next gun, so that the guns leapfrogged ever closer to the enemy position. In the 1898 Battle of Santiago, the famous charge of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill was supported by Parker’s Gatling battery, whose three guns fired 18,000 rounds in the eight-minute assault. Atop San Juan Hill, the Gatlings helped the Americans repel two Spanish counterattacks.

Although ignored during the world wars, the Gatling became the design foundation for General Electric’s Vulcan gun, a multibarrel electric machine gun, first produced in 1956, and widely used during the second half of the twentieth century in U.S. airplanes, helicopters, and antiaircraft defenses. Today, new electric Dillon Aero Gatling miniguns are used on American, British, and other nations’ helicopters, vehicles, and naval vessels.

Bibliography

Berk, Joseph. Gatling Gun: Nineteenth Century Machine Gun to Twenty-first Century Vulcan. Boulder, Colo.: Paladin Press, 1991. The first part of the book provides excellent technical descriptions of the nineteenth century Gatlings. The second part details how the Gatling design was updated and improved to produce the Vulcan gun, and describes the many different configurations of the Vulcan gun.

Hughes, James B. The Gatling Gun Notebook: A Collection of Data and Illustrations—Gatling Guns, Component Parts, Nomenclature, Mounts, Ammunition and Accessories, Makers, Users and Serial Numbers. Lincoln, R.I.: Andrew Mowbray, 2000. Excellent assembly of primary documents from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of the book consists of line drawings carefully copied from crumbling, yellowed originals. Extensive detail on purchases of the Gatlings and on the various calibers and other details of the different versions produced for different nations.

Keller, Julia. Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It. New York: Viking Press, 2008. Beautifully written biography by a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Much of the text puts Gatling in the broader context of nineteenth century America, an age whose virtues Richard Gatling embodied.

Stephenson, E. Frank, Jr. Gatling: A Photographic Remembrance. Murfreesboro, N.C.: Meherrin River Press, 1993. Superb collection of photographs, old documents, and biographical information about Gatling and his family. Compiled by an amateur historian who grew up near the house where Gatling was raised.