Richard Jordan Gatling (1818–1903)

[admin]

Richard Gatling spent most of his career trying to sell the U.S. Army a weapon they'd been burned on before — and that uphill battle is worth understanding if you want to know why good ideas sometimes die in procurement hell before they ever reach the field.

A gun efficient enough that one man could do the battle duty of a hundred would reduce the size of armies required, and fewer soldiers in the field meant fewer men dying of disease.

Take that reasoning however you want, but the mechanical logic behind it is real. Every multi-barrel rotary design since — including what's bolted into the nose of an A-10 — traces back to the same problem Gatling was solving: how do you sustain fire without cooking your barrel. The answer hasn't changed much in 160 years.

The New York Times purchased three guns and deployed them during the July 1863 draft riots, with the paper's owner and editor manning two of them to deter a mob threatening the building.

That's a sentence that does a lot of work. The official U.S. government didn't buy a single Gatling until 1866 — four years after the patent. Meanwhile a newspaper editor was out front running one during a riot. If you've ever waited on a Form 4 you understand the general dynamic, just on a different scale.

In 1893, Gatling patented a version driven by an electric motor rather than a hand crank — U.S. Patent No. 502185. The ten-barrel model could achieve 3,000 rounds per minute. At the time, the technology to make practical military use of that rate of fire did not exist; the gun went unadopted. It would take the Cold War to produce aircraft fast enough and engagements brief enough to make that kind of sustained fire density tactically necessary.

There's a lesson at the reloading bench here. The cartridge technology, the metallurgy, the manufacturing tolerances — everything has to be ready at the same time or the idea just sits on a shelf. Gatling was running at the edge of what the rest of the supply chain could support. The M61 Vulcan didn't show up until the 1950s because that's when the rest of the system finally caught up.

The early Ager "coffee-mill gun" fiasco — ten guns deployed, ten guns sent straight back to Washington in embarrassment — is what Gatling was fighting against every time he walked into an Army office. It's the same reason a bad batch of reloads or a spectacular malfunction at a match can poison people on a platform for years longer than the actual problem lasts.

What's the longest you've personally seen a bad reputation — for a firearm, a manufacturer, an ammunition brand — outlast whatever actually caused it?

---

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team