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.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: 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.
00:00:44
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 end all wars, rather than serve as a catalyst for designs that inspired more deadly ones still used in war today.
00:06:38
Speaker 1: 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 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. Here on our American Stories. Here at our American Stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told. But we can’t do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do, please go to our Americanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s our American Stories dot com.
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