Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling

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.

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