GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, BULLETS KILL PEOPLE:
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
“What we call the past is built on bits.”
— John Archibald Wheeler’s THE SEARCH FOR LINKS (Proc. 3d Int. Symp. Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Tokyo, 1989) HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
1818
September 12, Saturday: Richard Jordan Gatling was born near Murfreesboro, North Carolina.
Richard was thus a year younger than Henry Thoreau, but he would live much longer, becoming a medical doctor. In his obituary in 1903, Scientific American magazine would struggle valiantly to encapsulate all of this gentleman’s pretentiousness and sanctimony: “Dr. Gatling was the gentlest and kindliest of men. The sight of returning wounded soldiers early in the Civil War led him to consider how war’s horrors might be alleviated. By making war more terrible, it seemed to him nations would be less willing to resort to arms. He devoted himself to the study of ordnance and ballistics, and finally invented what may be considered the first modern machine gun.” One wonders why the magazine failed to spell out that Dr. Gatling protected his invention by obtaining Patent #36836 in 1862 only in philanthropy, in order to make it more readily available in the prevention of future war, and also why the magazine failed to cite the fact that for the duration of this patent the God-fearing family of Dr. Gatling received regular royalty payments only as their way to be a part of this process. Could they not at least have mentioned how untoward it was that the family’s name had gone into argot as a name for the “Saturday-Night Special” with which one sodden dolt relieves another in a bar –a “gat”?
“Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!” The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death….
Dr. Gatling’s novel surgical technology for efficiently and rapidly making multiple punctures through human bodies and thus causing them to cease forward movement would be successfully demonstrated to the Union in December 1862 and would be procured by the Union Navy, but would not be found acceptable by the Army Ordnance Department until 1866.1
2 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
1862
By this point in his career, at the age of 44, Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling had applied for at least 10 patents. For instance, in 1835 he had invented a screw propeller for ships but had missed filing the first such patent by a few months. In 1839 he had invented a seed-sowing rice planter which later would be adapted as a wheat drill. In this year, with civil war at hand, in Indianapolis, Indiana he demonstrated his 1st working model of machine gun. Its key elements were a lock cylinder containing six strikers which revolved with six gun barrels, powered by a hand crank. The device used separate .58 cal. paper cartridges and percussion caps, which allowed gas leakage. This initial model as yet attained only 200 shots per minute — but this was considered at the time verily a leaden horizontal hailstorm. GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
1. Ol’ Gat-dude isn’t the only home-grown fool the human species has as yet produced. I ran in a 10-kilometer race once in Palo Alto, California in 1984, with a weapons scientist named Freeman J. Dyson, author of SAVING THE WORLD, who had just authored a new book titled WEAPONS AND HOPE. I remember that he and his wife had on matching T-shirts with the logo “Disturbing the Universe with Weapons and Hope.” (Running as a team, they both came across the finish line well ahead of me.) Afterward I went to his lecture at Stanford University. One of the things he said was that we needed to have another city destroyed by an atomic bomb — because the world needed a reminder of how dreadful that was. In his lecture he kept using the term “maximize,” so after the lecture I raised my hand and asked him whether, in using that term, sometimes he actually meant not “maximize” but “optimize.” “There’s a difference?” he wondered, and gave a little smirk and a little barking laugh and went directly on to recognize the next raised hand in the audience.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
November 4: Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, medical doctor and inventor of agricultural implements, patented his 6- barrel machine gun. He would later adapt his invention to use steel-jacketed cartridges. The rate of fire for the gun was 250-300 rounds per minute. General Benjamin F. Butler would purchase a dozen for the Union at $1,000 each, including 1,200 rounds of ammunition for each weapon (three or four minutes of firepower assuming no machine jams), and would experiment with the new weapon on the Petersburg front in 1864.
Dr. Gatling, himself a survivor of the small pox, considered that the majority of the soldier fatalities of the Civil War on both sides were being lost to disease, rather than to gunshot wounds. He had therefore set out to invent a mechanical device “which could by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished” (how could such an agenda go wrong?). Dr. Gatling was, however, being presumed to be a Copperhead (a Northerner who sympathized with the Confederates) and supposedly part of a plot to seize border states for the Confederacy. Governor Morton of Indiana, seeing the gun being tested, would write an Assistant Secretary of War with his favorable impressions. Although the weapon was indeed accepted by the Union Navy, it would not until later be used by them in combat, and the Army would in general drag its heels in regard to this device until 1866. GATLING’S MACHINE GUN The gun had a number of problems.... The bores were tapered, and often the barrels and chambers did not exactly align, affecting accuracy and velocity. The chamber system itself, in which a paper cartridge was contained inside a capped steel chamber, was both expensive and fragile. While the gun showed much promise and fired the standard .58-caliber ammunition, it had ... many drawbacks and was ... radical in design and purpose ...
—HISTORICAL TIMES ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE CIVIL WAR, Patricia L. Faust (ed)
4 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
December: In its support for the armies of the Union, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator was becoming more and more downright chauvinist –tendentiously ambiguous statements such as that “the true fight is only begun” – statements such as “Never was death more nobly laughed to scorn” (which would indicate were they to be taken with any seriousness that what soldiers were going out to the battlefields for was to be killed, rather than in order to kill others).
Irish Catholic Archbishop John Joseph Hughes warned Secretary of State William H. Seward in general terms without naming the names of any of the penitents, of the sort of talk that was going down in the confessionals of his Catholic churches in the city of New-York. Some of his confessors were commenting that “their fighting” was fighting that was “to be done in the streets of this city.” Very clearly, the federal government was being made aware of the anti-draft white race riots that were about to begin.
At the Gatling Gun Company factory in Indianapolis, Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s initial production run of 6 weapons of mass destruction were destroyed by fire. This was most unsettling for the good doctor, who had been able to persuade himself that by increasing the efficiency of war killing and thus making for himself a shit-pot full of money, he could decrease the war killing. Dr. Gatling would arrange for a 2d production run, of 13 of these weapons of mass destruction, to be manufactured at the Cincinnati Type Factory. GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
1864
September 30, day: There was a struggle at Peebles’ Farm / Poplar Springs Church near Petersburg VA. It was presumably at about this point that Major General Benjamin F. Butler was having his troops try out Gatling’s machine gun, and apparently he would consider the use to have been successful (we don’t know his body count from the introduction of this new weapon). This would be the only use of such devices during our Civil War. At the Battle of Chapin’s Bluff leading up the siege of Richmond VA, the Reverend Captain Daniel Foster’s “colored troops” charged so far they couldn’t hear the bugle call for retreat, so he rode forward to get them regrouped. It is not true that the Reverend Foster had the honor of being the 1st person lost to machine-gun fire: what happened was, a Confederate sharpshooter shot him off his horse, and there was an eyewitness to this. According to this testimony, when the reverend hit the ground, he “made a valiant and successful effort to turn himself around, so that he could make good on his vow to die facing the enemy.” His troops would take up a collection and send the embalmed body of their white leader home to his wife in West Newbury, Massachusetts. His stone is in the Pleasant Street Cemetery there but is now rather difficult to read:
IN MEMORIAM REV. DANIEL FOSTER
Born in Hanover, N.H. Dec. 10, 1816
Chaplain of the 33d Mass. Reg. Vols. Captain of the 37th U.S. Col. Troops
Fell before Richmond, Va. Sept. 30, 1864
Greatly beloved and respected by the Officers of the Reg. and by his own men. [Friend?] of the poor and needy.
[Design]
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25:40.
1865
6 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
January: An improved model of Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s machine gun was tested by our Army Ordnance Department. Among other things, this improvement used rimfire copper-cased cartridges instead of the previous steel-chambered paper variety. GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
The men of the USS Constellation whose enlistments had expired were “paid off” and discharged, and the remainder of the crew was transferred to the USS St. Lawrence. The ship’s officers were sent on leave to await orders. The Constellation would finish its Civil War as a Receiving Ship at the Norfolk Navy Yard.
When a fire razed the 2nd floor of the Smithsonian castle, destroying its lecture room, the head of the Institution, Joseph Henry, had reason to rejoice at this loss of a facility which had caused him so much trouble three years earlier, when the abolitionists had begun to dominate it. “Our system of public lectures will, of course, be discontinued with the destruction of the lecture room.”
General Sherman declared that a strip 30 miles in width along the coast southward from Charleston, including the sea islands off that coast, and the farmlands along the St. Johns River in Florida, was to be broken up into 40-acre tracts for issuance to families of former slaves.2
1866
Near Seymour, Indiana, the Reno gang commits North America’s first peacetime train robbery. Toward deterring such outrages, the railroad and express companies start hiring private detectives and special agents. While the Pinkertons (“We Never Sleep”) and the hard cases hired by E.H. Harriman to track down Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch were the most famous cinder dicks, it was the agents of Wells Fargo who helped change American jurisprudence by insisting on orderly trials instead of lynchings.
The US federal government purchased some of Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s machine guns. GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
2. Only those black American families on certain of the coastal islands would be able to retain this land, once the KKK was able to swing into operation, and only by threat of resort to armed rebellion.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
1870
A Texas gambler, Ben Thompson, pioneered the shoulder holster so his rather intimidatingly large revolver could be on display during card games.
Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s sold his machine gun patent to Colt (he would remain as his company’s president).
GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
8 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
1893
July 25, day: Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s obtained a patent on a new improved machine gun, one in which frantic hand cranking was superceded by an electric motor which would enable the device to spew 3,000 rounds per minute.3
GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
3. Until, of course, God willing, the device overheated or jammed or ran short of ammo. Every war they kill you a new way.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 9 HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
1897
Above decks Britain’s Royal Navy was experimenting with ship-to-shore radio. Below decks it finally bowed to Victorian sensibilities and allowed enlisted men to eat with forks in addition to knives and fingers.
Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling’s had sold his machine gun patent to Colt in 1870 but had remained the president of his company. In this year the company was fully absorbed into the Colt organization. GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
1903
February 26, day: At this point Richard Jordan Gatling, who had invented not only agricultural implements but also a hand-cranked machine gun, went to meet his Maker. Dr. Gatling had successfully demonstrated his novel surgical technology for efficiently and rapidly making multiple punctures through human bodies and thus causing them to cease forward movement to the Union in December 1862 but the weapon had seen Civil War use only on the Petersburg front and only in 1864 (body count not available). GATLING’S MACHINE GUN
Scientific American magazine would struggle valiantly to encapsulate all of this gentleman’s pretentiousness and sanctimony: “Dr. Gatling was the gentlest and kindliest of men. The sight of returning wounded soldiers early in the Civil War led him to consider how war’s horrors might be alleviated. By making war more terrible, it seemed to him nations would be less willing to resort to arms. He devoted himself to the study of ordnance and ballistics, and finally invented what may be considered the first modern machine gun.” One wonders why the magazine failed to spell out that Dr. Gatling protected his invention by obtaining Patent #36836 in 1862 only in philanthropy, in order to make it more readily available in the prevention of future war, and also why the magazine failed to cite the fact that for the duration of this patent the God-fearing family of Dr. Gatling received regular royalty payments only as their way to be a part of this process. Could they not at least have mentioned how untoward it was that the family’s name had gone into argot as a name for the “Saturday-Night Special” with which one sodden dolt relieves another in a bar –a “gat”?
“Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!” The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death....
10 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: May 13, 2013
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
12 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING DR. RICHARD JORDAN GATLING
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 13