Richard Jordan Gatling, a North Carolina inventor of seed planters and wheat drills, patented his battery gun in 1862 believing that one machine doing the work of a hundred riflemen would shrink armies and spare soldiers from camp diseases like cholera and dysentery. This episode explains how the hand-cranked weapon worked: six to ten barrels rotating around a central axis, gravity feeding cartridges from a hopper, and each barrel firing once per revolution so it could cool, eventually reaching about 800 rounds per minute with the Bruce feed.

The U.S. Army did not adopt the gun until 1866, so Union officers bought twelve with their own money for the Siege of Petersburg. Gatlings appeared during the 1863 New York draft riots and the 1877 railroad strike, then spread through colonial wars from Zululand to Khartoum. Lieutenant John Parker’s crews fired 18,000 rounds in eight and a half minutes at San Juan Hill in 1898, yet the Army declared every model obsolete in 1911. Jet-age engineers revived the rotating-barrel concept with electric and hydraulic drives for the M61 Vulcan and the GAU-8 Avenger on the A-10.

• Russian colonel Alexander Gorlov had Colt nameplates replaced with his own, and Russia called the weapon the Gorlov gun.
• Bottlenecked British cartridges tore apart in sandy chambers and jammed every barrel at once.
• Henry Newbolt’s 1892 poem Vitai Lampada includes the line “the Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead.”
• The Model 1895 was painted olive drab instead of bare, shining metal.
• Black powder smoke and heavy wheeled carriages left Gatling crews exposed and slow in the jungles of Cuba and the Philippines.