Puckle Gun

The Puckle gun is an early crew-served rapid-fire weapon patented in 1718 by the English inventor, lawyer and writer James Puckle, built as a manually operated flintlock revolver mounted on a tripod, with a hand-cranked cylinder holding multiple pre-loaded chambers that could be fired in succession without reloading each shot individually. Its inventive design earned it a description as a machine gun in a 1722 shipping manifest, nearly a century and a half before that term came into general use for automatic weapons, though the Puckle gun's mechanism remained fully manual rather than truly automatic. Despite the novelty of the concept, the weapon was never adopted for military service and saw no combat use, with historical records indicating that only around two examples were ever actually built, leaving it a curiosity in the early history of rapid-fire weapon design rather than a fielded weapon of war.