#Gun September 28

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This month the #Coach4adayChallenge for September is to profile a biography of someone. A North Carolina native obtained a total of 43 patents throughout his life, for devices ranging from a steam-driven tractor to an improved flush toilet. Yet., it was a GUN named after him that he became associated with.

Richard Jordan Gatling was born in Hertford County (NC) in 1818 to a wealthy farming family. Gatling helped his father, a wealthy planter, develop better farming implements, tools and machinery for sowing and harvesting cotton.

In 1844, soon after obtaining his first patent, for a new type of seed planter, Gatling moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he continued to develop farming implements and machinery for growing rice and wheat. 

Gatling Gun

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Richard Gatling was living in Indianapolis, Indiana. Though he had been born in the South, he was a staunch supporter of the Union. The Civil War made Gatling think about the horrors of war and he thought a GUN that could do the work of many would diminish so many of those problems.

From that idea the first successful machine gun, known as the Gatling GUN was invented by Richard J. Gatling in 1862. Despite its invention during the Civil War it didn’t really get used that much. It did have a role in the 1865 siege of Petersburg, VA

The Gatling GUN had six metal barrels arranged in a circle and mounted on a wheeled cart. As the gun’s operator turned the crank, a bullet entered a barrel from a magazine and then rotated to the firing position. After each bullet was fired, that barrel continued to move and was reloaded with another bullet.

Here is YouTube Video of what it would have looked like

The Army officially adopted the Gatling GUN in 1866, and its visibility grew steadily from there.

Gatling died in New York City when he was 85 years of age in 1903 but not before he invented one last invention, the motor-driven plow, in 1900.