Gatling Gun

The Gatling gun is an early rapid-fire weapon invented by the American Richard Jordan Gatling and patented in 1862, using a hand-cranked cluster of multiple barrels rotating around a central shaft so that each barrel fired, ejected and reloaded in sequence as the crank turned, achieving rates of fire far beyond any single-barrel weapon of its day. Gatling designed the weapon hoping its firepower would reduce the number of soldiers needed on a battlefield, though it saw only limited use during the American Civil War before being adopted more widely by the United States Army and other militaries in the following decades, including use against Spanish forces during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Fully automatic machine guns made the hand-cranked Gatling gun obsolete by the early twentieth century, but its rotating multi-barrel principle was revived in the mid-twentieth century for aircraft cannon and remains in use today in weapons such as the M61 Vulcan.