Gardner gun

The Gardner gun was an early hand-cranked mechanical machine gun invented in 1874 by William Gardner of Toledo, Ohio, a former Union Army captain. It was built with two barrels in its original form, and also with five barrels or a single barrel, and was fed from a vertical hopper magazine. Turning the crank moved a feed arm to place a cartridge in the breech, closed the bolt and fired, and a further turn opened the breechblock and extracted the spent case, all driven by a cam mechanism. Pratt and Whitney developed a military version, but the United States Army declined to buy it after demonstrations in the late 1870s. The British Royal Navy and then the British Army adopted it instead, and it saw action in the Mahdist War, notably at the Battle of Abu Klea, where desert sand and dust fouled its mechanism. A later Nepalese derivative, the Bira gun, was made in very small numbers.