Gatling Had First Success With Rapid-Fire Weapon Development

By Rob Morgan

Winter 2000 - Vol. 22 No. 1

Editor’s Note: In the Summer 2000 issue The Artilleryman published “The Guns Col. Custer Left Behind As 7th Cavalry Looked for Indians“ by Ernest M. Teagrden. After reading that, Robert Morgan of Wales sent this article about rapid-fire guns that he wrote several years ago.

Total war breeds the weapons necessary to wage it. The American Civil War was no exception to this. Almost from the first days of the war, in the spring of 1861, enterprising ordnance men, North and South, were developing rapid-fire weapons.

Some came to nothing. There were the Vandenberg volley-gun and the Billinghurst "Requa" battery gun of 1861; both were little more than refinements of the 15th century organ gun principle (The Artilleryman Fall 2000), and certainly no advance in the field of rapid fire weapons.

The Billinghurst gun, built in Rochester, N.Y., was a complex arrangement of 25 barrels of .58 caliber firing simultaneously in seven consecutive volleys; with a range of around 1,000 yards, it could be elevated by means of a screw. The weapon suffered from hazards described at the time as "of sparks and rain" because loose black powder was used.

By 1862, Union specialists had produced the "Agar Coffee-Mill Gun"(a real committee created weapon!), and Capt. R. William of the CSA had produced his machine gun, basically a 1-pdr. forerunner of the pompom. Both weapons saw action, though the Agar was unpopular with Union troops because it was so unreliable, being hopper fed and very difficult to reload. Captain William’s gun, however, was a magnificent weapon.

Then there was the Gatling gun. Richard Gatling was born in North Carolina in 1819 and qualified as a doctor of medicine, but never practiced his profession. Instead, he followed his father in becoming an inventor and “mechanic.” They developed and built machines to plant and work cotton and rice amongst other things, and owned a substantial factory producing machinery for the agricultural South at Cincinnati.

Somehow Dr. Gatling saw a test of the Agar gun and realized that its major drawback was that a single barrel of limited caliber firing 100-120 rounds a minute would rapidly overheat and permanently jam after only a few "hoppers" were fired off. This indeed was the main complaint of the Federal gunners who used the weapon in combat.

To overcome the problem and to enable rounds to be fed into the gun and extracted at rapid speed, Gatling created a weapon with six barrels which revolved around a central spindle. He retained the popular .58 caliber and ammunition, but his invention allowed each of the barrels to fire in succession, turned by a crank handle.

As the first barrel was cranked to the top position, the bolt slid back and a cartridge dropped behind the chamber, it traveled down, chambered and the breech closed. The loaded barrel’s firing point was at the 5 o'clock position.

After firing, as the barrel moved back upwards the breech opened and the empty cartridge case was ejected. The barrel was then ready to accept the next round. Simply put, for every 60 rounds fired off, each single barrel would have a rate of only 10, completely eliminating the problem of overheating. Dr Gatling’s system worked.

In the summer of 1862, Gatling demonstrated the prototype weapon at Indianapolis to the state governor who was most impressed and wrote to the Secretary of War suggesting official testing and urgent adoption. Six examples were built at a Cincinnati factory, but were destroyed soon afterwards, together with drawings, in a disastrous fire which was attributed by many to Confederate agents.

Gatling persevered and patented the gun in November of 1862. He placed a private order with McWhinney Ridge, a leading Cincinnati engineering company, which made him a dozen guns of .58 caliber and also improved his cartridge design by developing a rim fire round, copper cased; this improved loading and ignition.

The guns were tested and sold together with a significant quantity of ammunition to Maj. Gen. Ben Butler, commander of the Union forces at Baltimore. He paid for the guns with a large amount of U.S. currency which he had confiscated from the Dutch consul whom he had accused of secreting funds to aid the Confederacy. 

Butler used the weapons in the Union siege of Petersburg, but with little idea of their potential and to no effect. He was relieved of his command after several disasters, and with his departure several of his purchases were acquired for river gunboats by Adm. David D. Porter. After a period a further dozen were ordered by the able Union Gen. Winfield S. Hancock, who commanded the veteran I Corps. These troops used the Gatlings effectively in several late-war actions.

Richard Gatling’s gun was continually improved as the Civil War progressed, yet he sold few of them and it was not adopted by the U.S. Army until 1866. This was because the Federal Secret Service believed Gatling held Confederate sympathies, and feared that if he were given a major contract, then Lee would hear of it, and mount a raid across the Ohio River to seize the guns and machinery before they could be delivered.

Gatling was kept under surveillance throughout the war, and his contract with Butler was extensively investigated. From the Union point of view this was a very serious error. If, and war is always a series of ifs, the Gatling had been widely adopted, the tough Confederate infantry could not have stood against it.

The effect of three or four such guns against, say, Pickett's charge at Gettysburg can be imagined. However, Richard Gatling took no further orders for his guns until the war had drawn to its bloody close.

By the time the U.S. adopted the gun, it had been significantly improved through several marks. The government ordered 50 .5 caliber guns, and as a result of an evaluation of captured versions of the Confederate William Machine Gun, 50 Gatlings of 1-inch caliber were manufactured at the famous Colt works under Richard Gatling’s supervision.

Colt soon began to sell the weapon, in a 10-barreled version, to European armies. After a long period of trial and evaluation the British finally bought the gun, though with the usual British desire to improve on the work of foreigners, an interior cartridge was preferred to the standard brass casing. As a result jamming was always a problem with the Gatling in British hands.

It was the Royal Navy which used the Gatling first, and with great success in a number of theaters of war. At Tel-el-Kebir in September 1882, for example, six naval Gatlings devastated the Egyptians in a matter of minutes, causing almost 3,000 casualties for little loss. The Prussian army was impressed by the gun, and the Russians also took significant numbers.

In Russian service the Gatling was known as the “Gorloff” after the elderly general sent by the Tsar to buy 400 of them in America. Russian forces used them in many Asiatic campaigns, often against massed light cavalry with brutal efficiency and effectiveness.

The Gatling gun was the quintessential weapon of late 19th-century colonial warfare, no doubt about that. It was the failure of one general to use the Gatling which caused the U.S. Amy to suffer its major, and most humiliating, defeat of the period. George Armstrong Custer attacked the Sioux at the Little Bighorn River on June 25, 1876; his 7th Cavalry were armed with elderly, single-shot breech-loading Sharps carbines. Crazy Horse's warriors, however, had wisely purchased the splendid Winchester repeating rifle in substantial quantities. End result, the destruction of the 7th Cavalry, the death of Custer and the loss of 212 men under his command.

What the frequent Hollywood remakes fail to show is that Custer had been given four new, improved .5 caliber Gatling guns, each capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Custer did not like them, and so they stayed with the rear supply column. It seems possible to argue that forward use of these weapons might just have tipped the battle in Custer's favor.

By 1883, a very large drum magazine known as the "Accles feed" was patented, and improved the Gatling's firing rate by as much as 25 percent. A decade later Dr. Gatling, in collaboration with Colt, had produced an electrically operated 10-barreled weapon firing an incredible 3,000 rounds per minute; and in 1896, an automatic gas rotated version was brought into service.

By the time of Richard Gatling’s death in 1903, the gun was still in regular service. Indeed, it was still in use in colonial campaigns, on men of war, and as a fortress weapon up to and throughout the Great War; there is some evidence that later Gatling designs were in use during the Warlord period in China during the late 1920s.

Long before this, back in the 1890s, the Gatling design was overtaken by that of Hiram Maxim's truly automatic single-barreled gun, which was lighter and able to operate well forward with infantry under all conditions.

However, the basic principle of the Gatling — a very high rate of fire divided amongst a number of barrels, each rotating, has endured. Today, a new generation of multi-barreled weapons exists in ground attack aircraft and in close-in warship mounted gun systems such as the General Electric Vulcan Phalanx. The latter weapon achieves a rate of fire of 6,000 rounds a minute, which no single-barreled weapon could hope to achieve without meltdown!

Naturally, wherever this new breed are found, the men who operate them call them by the old, trusted name, “Gatling.”

 

(About the Author: Military and maritime historian Robert Morgan is secretary of the Welsh Maritime Association and a member of the Ordnance Society who writes frequently about artillery and fortifications.)