Elenco MultiBarrel Cannon - Manual (Page 9)

7
(September 12, 1818 - February 26, 1903)
Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling developed a working prototype
for the Gatling Gunin 1862, hundreds of years after Da Vinci
invented the Multi-Barreled Cannon. Gatling created a
rapid-fire weapon that was a forerunner of the modern machine
gun. The Gatling gun is considered a machine gun because
it shoots a large number of bullets in a short time span, but
unlike modern machine guns, the gun was not fully automatic.
A crank had to be turned manually if the gun was to
continue shooting. The first fully automatic machine
gun is credited to Hiram Maxim. Maxim's gun could shoot more than 500 rounds
per minute, giving it the firepower of about 100 rifles. The mechanism of the Maxim
gun used the energy from the recoil to eject each spent cartridge and insert the next
one. This made it vastly more efficient than previous machine guns.
Pioneers of the modern day machine gun
THE MULTI-BARRELED CANNON CONCEPT WAS A PRECURSOR
TO THE MODERN DAY MACHINE GUN
A British 1865 Gatling gun at Firepower -
The Royal Artillery Museum
Patent drawing for R.J. Gatling's Battery Gun,
9 May 1865.
Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling