Gatling Machine Gun Was Declared Obsolete by the United States Military

DR. GATLING’S TECHNOLOGY FOR BRINGING AN END TO WAR “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) 1718 At about this point the Prussians were introducing iron ramrods and funnel-shaped touch-holes. These innovations were providing their soldiers with a faster and more reliable means of loading their flintlocks and thus increasing their rate of disciplined fire to nearly six volleys per minute. Still, using an iron rod and hammer to pound lead balls into a steel tube is a noisy process, so hunters were continuing to wrap their rounds in greased patches and pound them home with a wooden mallet and ramrod (which is another reason why the European military preferred smoothbore muskets whereas North Americans preferred long- barreled rifles). The first “machine gun” may have been James Puckle’s handcranked, single-barrel revolving-chamber flintlock of this year, since it was able to fire nine bullets in succession. To consider such a “revolver” a machine gun would be stretching the current concept, it is granted, but such stretching points up that the category is an exceedingly flexible one: for instance, some assert that there was no true machine gun before the invention made by Hiram Stevens Maxim while others assert that, since it is required that the weapon continue to fire while the trigger is depressed, even this 1885 device failed to constitute the first real “machine gun.” HDT WHAT? INDEX THE GATLING GUN THE GATLING GUN 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 THE GATLING GUN THE GATLING GUN 1856 A improved multiple-shot weapon operated by the turning of a crank was developed by a C.E. Barnes. (It appears that this particular machine gun was not demonstrated to either side during our Civil War.) 1861 June 1: Several centuries beyond Hannah Emerson Duston’s bloody act of 17th-Century race vengeance, the 1st monument in the United States commemorating the fame of a woman, a 25-foot obelisk, was erected, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Guess who!2 At some point during this month J.D. Mills would demonstrate to President Abraham Lincoln a Union Repeating Gun that someone, perhaps Edward Nugent or William Palmer, had developed. This device was mounted on wheels and had a tray of cartridges that, as the operator turned a crank, dropped into the rotating cylinder. Lincoln would in a few months on his own authority place an order for 10 such “coffee-mills” at $1,300 each. October: As the very 1st machine-gun procurement ever, without consulting anyone President Abraham Lincoln authorized $1,300 each for a lot of 10 “coffee-mills” (Union Repeating Guns). –He was hoping, of course, to make the world safe for democracy. 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 THE GATLING GUN THE GATLING GUN December 19, Thursday: In a two-page document created in Talbot County, Georgia on this date, there appears the written appraisal of the eleven slaves of the estate of one William Daniel. Each slave is listed by name and value. An example: “Ranval a negro man Appraised at $800.” General McClellan bought 50 of the “Union Repeating Gun” or “coffee-mill” machine guns at $735 each. A couple of these would be given to Colonel John Geary to test, and he would be unimpressed, reporting they were “inefficient and unsafe to the operators.” General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson would capture 17 such “revolving guns” at the Harpers Ferry arsenal, but there is no report that he then attempted to use them in combat. Earlier this month (not in late January as sometimes reported), the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway had spoken at Concord Town Hall of “The Death and Resurrection of Captain John Brown.” Needing to know when he was scheduled to speak in Boston, James Henry Lane (1814-1866) sent a telegram from Washington DC to the Reverend George Luther Stearns in Boston. 2. At some point during this decade the 25-foot granite monolith which the town of Haverhill had erected upon its common in honor of its fave local ax murderer, Hannah Emerson Duston, would be repossessed by the stonecarvers and cut up into individual tombstones for resale, when subscribers got behind in their payments. New England literati wrestled over Duston’s grisly tale for centuries. Cotton Mather lauded her courageous stand against Catholic (French) inspired “idolators” and saw her deliverance as evidence of God’s mercy. Henry Thoreau, floating down the same Merrimack by which Duston had fled, thought her exploits worthier of the Dark Ages than an enlightened modern era. Haverhill native John Greenleaf Whittier cast her as an avenging angel acting in a fury of passion. And intent as always on revealing a stain in the Puritan soul, Nathaniel Hawthorne dourly offered in THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE OF USEFUL AND ENTERTAINING KNOWLEDGE, “Would that the bloody old hag had been drowned in crossing Contocook river.” 4 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX THE GATLING GUN THE GATLING GUN 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 “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX THE GATLING GUN THE GATLING GUN 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.

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