The Gun Designed to End All Wars: Richard Gatling & His Gun

On this episode of Our American Stories, Richard Gatling hoped that the tremendous power of his new Civil War weapon would discourage large-scale battles and show the folly of war. Here to tell the story is Ashley Hlebinsky.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Richard Gatling hoped that the tremendous power of his new
Civil War weapon would discourage large scale battles and show
the folly of war. What would happen here? To tell
the story of Gatling is Ashley Lebinski. Take it away, Ashley.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
There aren't sufficient words to describe the horrible tragedies that
befell Americans during the Civil War from eighteen sixty one
to eighteen sixty five, with an estimated of over six
hundred thousand dead in just four short years. At the
beginning of the war, or a colonel and a dentist
wondered if there could be a weapon so terrible that

(01:04):
it would deter warfare from continuing. That dentist was Richard
Jordan Gatling, and he decided to take on that task
with his invention that bore his name, the Gatling Gun.
Born in eighteen eighteen in North Carolina, Gatling showed a
lot of promise for inventing. Pretty early on. He created

(01:25):
improvements on steamboats and also different agricultural equipment. Although after
about a smallpox Galing decided to shift to a career
in medicine, and he earned his MD in eighteen fifty
from the Ohio Medical College, but he actually never practiced
as a doctor. In eighteen sixty one, Galing took out
a patent for repeating rifle battery. Now people often incorrectly

(01:49):
cite the Gatling gun as a machine gun, although that
definition is misleading. A machine gun itself fires continuously with
one trigger press, but Gatling's gun operated with a hand
crank at the back of the gun, so the gun
was seated onto a carriage. It was a very very
large piece of artillery and it had multiple barrels that
were affixed around a central access similar to that of

(02:12):
a cylinder on a revolver. And the rate of fire
was about two hundred rounds per minute on the initial
Gatling guns, although you could kind of say that the
rate of fire was however fast you could turn the crank,
but later models would fire up to four hundred rounds
per minute, which is pretty impressive when you think that
the standard military firearm at the time of the American

(02:32):
Civil War is a single shot rifle musket that if
you were good, you could fire maybe three shots a minute,
so the differences is pretty impressive. Gatling, though, is a
really interesting character because he's a bit of a hypocrite.
He was living in Indiana at the time the war
broke out. He was a Freemason, and he had no

(02:53):
problem selling his Gatling gun to the Union. But simultaneously
he was an active member in the Order of the
American Knights, which was a secret group of Confederate sympathizers
who often operated as silent saboteurs in the North. Ultimately,
the Gatling gun was a bit ahead of its time,
as the style of warfare at the beginning of the

(03:15):
war didn't really call for a gun with that kind
of size and that kind of firepower, because most of
the fighting was happening shoulder to shoulder, meaning that as
soldiers would stand in lines together row after row after row,
and they were equipped with rifle muskets. Interestingly, though, during
the Civil War, two Gatling guns were stationed at the

(03:35):
New York Times in Manhattan in order to quell riots
that consisted of draft dodgers in what a lot of
people call one of the bloodiest outbreaks of civil disorder
in American history. But on the battlefield, the gatling gun
really doesn't appear until around eighteen sixty four at the
sieges of Petersburg in Virginia, and that military purpose started

(03:58):
to appear for the gatling gun. And because warfare changed
by the end of the Civil War, so initially soldiers
are essentially a human wall, but by the end of
the war you start seeing the earliest styles of trench
warfare begin, and so at Petersburg, trenches were dug and
the Gallan guns were set up around the perimeter in

(04:19):
order to be utilized in kind of your earliest form
of trench warfare, which will be modernized and used mostly
during World War One, and the gallan gun also appeared
in some forms by use in the Navy. The US Army, though,
did adopt the gatling gun in eighteen sixty six, but
the gathering gun is probably more prolific in the movies

(04:41):
than it actually was in any practical application in American
military history. It saw a lot more widespread adoption overseas
in places like Africa and Asia. Even George Armstrong Custer
wasn't a fan during the Plains Indian Wars because the
Gallan gun was so cumbersome with its carriage that it
really wasn't used full on mountainous terrain out west, and

(05:03):
the Gallan gun quickly kind of became a technology that
was too far advanced when it was first developed, but
was quickly outpaced by new inventions such as the automatic
machine gun. Galings were present at the Battle of San
Juan Hill during the Spanish American War in eighteen ninety eight,
but so were Colt Model eighteen ninety five machine guns,

(05:24):
which proved far more effective, especially when you consider the
fact that they were literally fighting up a hill and
the Galling gun is a very, very large gun. Galling
would try to maintain some level of relevance and would
approve upon the gun during his lifetime, but it wouldn't
truly show its potential until a century later, believe it

(05:44):
or not, when designers affixed belts to the surviving Gatling
guns and turned them into the earliest prototypes for today's
mini gun, capable of firing over six thousand rounds a minute.
But back to Gatling himself. After his limited success with
the gun, he went back to inventions outside the gun world,
including improvements on toilets, bicycles, cleaning wool, pneumatics, and many

(06:09):
other fields. His work was recognized. He was elected the
first president of the American Association of Inventors and Manufacturers
in eighteen ninety one, But unfortunately, Gataling died after losing
his fortunes through bad investments in nineteen o three. A
sad ending for a man who, according to legend, had
the naive and feudal dream to make a gun to

(06:31):
end all wars, rather than serve as a catalyst for
designs that inspired more deadly ones still used in war today.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
And a terrific job by the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to
Ashley Lebinski. She's the co host of Discovery Channel's Master
of Arms, former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum,
and she's the co founder of the University of Wyoming
College of Laws Firearms Research Center. And what a story

(06:59):
she'd told about a gun that was much more useful
for movie lore and mythology than in actual war, good
for trench warfare, for a spot too big to move
along with troops, and in the end, some of the
technology adopted by other firearms to be used down the
road in warfare. The story of Richard Gatling and his gun.

(07:23):
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