Richard Jordan Gatling was born in 1818 in Hertford County, North Carolina, to a Methodist family and was a compulsive tinkerer. At 21 he built a working screw propeller for steamboats, only to find John Ericsson had patented nearly the same device months earlier. After work as a clerk, teacher and merchant, he moved to St. Louis and invented a rice sowing machine and a wheat drill whose rotating cylinder dropped seeds one at a time into a furrow. A bout of smallpox drew him to medicine, and he graduated from Ohio Medical College in 1850 but never practiced. Living in Indianapolis when the Civil War began, he noticed that disease in camps killed more soldiers than combat and reasoned that a rapid-fire gun would let smaller armies win, sparing men from the camps.
He adapted the seed drill’s rotation into six barrels turned by a hand crank, fed by gravity from a hopper, with a prototype in 1861 and the Gatling Gun Company founded in 1862. A fire destroyed his first six guns, rumors branded him a Copperhead, and the U.S. government did not adopt the weapon until 1866. He sold the patents to Colt in 1870 but led the company until 1897, adding an electric motor in 1893. He died in New York in 1903 at 84 while planning steam tractors, and is buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
- He financed the first six production guns himself and then had 13 more made in Cincinnati.
- Union general Benjamin F. Butler bought 12 guns, and Admiral David Dixon Porter bought one for naval use.
- His wife Jemima Sanders was the sister-in-law of Indiana governor David Wallace.
- He also patented work on bicycles, pneumatic power, steam cleaning of wool and flushing toilets.
- The Army declared the hand-cranked gun obsolete in 1911, but its rotating barrels returned in the M61 Vulcan.
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