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Title:	GUN, GATLING -  GATLING RAPID-FIRE GUN MODEL 1862 TYPE II .58
Maker/Manufacturer:	GATLING, RICHARD J.
Date of Manufacture:	C 1862
Eminent Figure:
Catalog Number:	SPAR 5613
Measurements:	OL: 64" BL: 33"

Object Description:

GATLING RAPID-FIRE GUN MODEL 1862 TYPE II .58
Manufactured by McWhinny, Rindge, & Co., Cincinnati, Oh. in 1863 - Model 1862 Type II hand-cranked rapid-fire gun. Gatling which fires a copper cased .58 caliber rimfire cartridge which was inserted into a bored-through chambered tube. Round fed loosely into hopper. 6-barrels with a rate of fire of 800 rpm. Weapon has an overall length of 64" and the barrels are 33". Patented 11/4/1862.

1909 Catalog #11001 -"Gatling Gun. Pat. Nov. 4 1862. Cal..58. Loaded with percussion cartridges. Six barrels."

"It takes from three to five men to work the gun to its full capacity, and it is estimated that two of the guns are fully equal to a regiment of men. One of these guns with its appendages ready for action, costs about $1,500. A regiment of men ready for the field, costs about $50,000 and it takes $150,000 to keep a regiment in service twelve months. It will be seen from the above that it would be a great economy to use the Gatling gun." - Indianapolis Evening Gazette.

Notes: "The story of the Gatling Gun is the tale of a machine which has endured for one hundred and thirty-six years. In that time the gun has gone from a formidable stepchild of the military, which no one really knew how to employ effectively, to an exotic weapons system capable of unbelievable rates of fire....Yet today's guns differs but little from Gatling's first center-fire model; the major difference being the method of feeding and the power source. It is truly a remarkable device." - Morgan Davis

"It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished." - Richard Gatling

"As Gatling said of his own piece: 'It bears the same relation to other firearms that McCormack's Reaper does to the sickle, or the sewing machine to the common needle.' But the military establishments of Europe and America did not wish to face up to this fact, and were, in fact, incapable of doing so. For the machine gun was a product of the Industrial Revolution, of the fundamental changes in manufacturing and financial techniques that had gathered pace during the nineteenth century. To the proponents of this massive technological leap the machine was the answer to everything. For them even killing could be mechanized and made more efficient. But the various armies remained outside this school of thought. The bulk of their officers came from those very landowning classes that had been left behind by the Industrial Revolution. They tried to make the army a last bastion of the attitudes and the life-style that had characterized the pre-industrial world. Because of their rigid hierarchical structures and the fact that all promotions had to be sanctioned from above they were able, for decade after decade, to minimize the impact of the new faith in science and machine." - Ellis

"The North was deprived of a great ordnance officer when Major General Gorgas joined the Confederacy, but this loss was more than offset when Richard Jordan Gatling moved to the North in 1844, hoping to manufacture and market several of his mechanical inventions.
Gatling was born in Hertford County, N.C., on 12 September 1818. His parents were Mary Barnes and Jordan Gatling, both descended from English colonists in North Carolina. His father, while still a young man, had invented a machine for planting cotton and another for thinning the plants to a stand. Richard Jordan Gatling assisted in the construction of these mechanical aids and in his own name, patented a rice planter. The younger Gatling, believing that the prospects of a northern market were more profitable, adapted his rice planter to other grain, and moved to various cities in Missouri, Ohio, and Indiana.
In 1847-48, he studied medicine at Laporte, Ind. The following year he entered Ohio Medical College from which he received a degree. While he was evPurportedly at the a suggestion by Col. R.A. Maxwell that a special objectives weapon was needed, Gatling drew up plans for a machine gun. Conceived in 1861 and patented in 1862, it was designed to defend buildings, causeways, and bridges. The first model was only a crude forerunner of the gun he soon perfected, the prototype of one of the most remarkable firing mechanisms of all ordnance history - the Gatling gun.
The weapon was the logical outgrowth of the trends portrayed in the Ager and Ripley guns. Gatling combined the best principles of both and overcame their most objectionable features. His successful results caused him to be credited generally with being the father of the machine gun.
The 1862 Gatling guns, types I and II, were fundamentally the Ager principle, improved by the multibarrel arrangements of the Ripley gun. In these models the engineering difficulties had not been completely overcome. However, his first gun had the basic design groundwork. It was crank-operated with six revolving barrels, having a bolt for each barrel. Cocking and firing were performed by cam action and the weapon was gear driven. By taking advantage of the machine tool progress, he was the first to have used successfully a method of camming to insure positive action.
This model had many of the bad features of its forerunner the Ager. It used paper cartridges and steel charges that acted as firing chambers. The chargers were primed with percussion caps on nipples and the bolts acted as strikers to fire the caps. The chargers were supported during combustion by a cylindrical piece that housed the striker. A hopper gravity feed similar to that of the Ager was also used.
As early as 1862 enough progress had been made on the weapon that a model, actually in working order, was exhibited before thousands of people in Indianapolis. One of the most interested spectators was the Hon. O.P. Morton, Governor of Indiana. This gentleman wrote to P.H. Watson, then Assistant Secretary of War, advising him of the weapon's unusual performance. He suggested that Dr. Gatling's gun be permitted officially to prove its worth.
With this encouragement, Gatling continued to perfect his prototype until he deemed it reliable enough to pass any government test. Financial backers were sought in order to produce the weapon in sufficient quantities should the armed services become interested. With all the capital he could muster, Gatling went to Cincinnati, Ohio. There Miles Greenwood & Co. contracted to make six weapons in accordance with his patent of 4 November 1862.
Unfortunately for Gatling this factory, together with the weapons then near completion, blueprints and patterns, was destroyed by fire. The inventor was subjected to a heavy loss, both in money and in irreplaceable pilot models used in constructing these first weapons.
But he was not easily discouraged. After a very short interval he was again in business now backed by McWhinny, Rindge & Co., also of Cincinnati. This time 12 guns of the 1862 model were manufactured.
Constantly seeking perfection, Gatling made several basic construction changes soon after the guns left the factory. For instance, the prototype and the November 1862 weapons employed a steel container with a percussion cap on the end and paper cartridges for the charge. Soon after the guns were completed by McWhinny, Rindge & Co., Gatling decided to use copper in place of paper in the cartridge cases. These metal cartridges were rim fire, which necessitated the placing of two projections on the bolt head to strike the rim-fire primer. The striker served both as a firing pin and as a hammer while eliminating the use of the percussion cap on a nipple. In view of these modifications the gun can be classified correctly as type II of the 1862 model.
Results were so successful that, while the inventoThe copper-cased rim-fire ammunition was a definite step forward. It made the 1862 model Gatling easier to load and more certain to fire. However, it did not overcome the one difficulty that plagues all revolver-type firearms: the excessive gas leakage that takes plagues all revolver-type firearms; the excessive gas leakage that takes place between the forward end of the cylinder and the breech end of the barrel.
Gatling tried to solve this in both of his 1862 types by using a fixed steel cam, so placed as to wedge the charges tightly against the barrel at the moment of firing. This arrangement was not too efficient. It made the crank hard to turn and caused excessive wear on the parts involved. To some extent this galling action could be compensated for by an adjusting screw that controlled the fore and aft position of the cartridge container.
Both types of the 1862 model were made with six barrels and in rifle caliber .58 only. One of the oddest things about the design of the guns was a tapered bore, which was used to overcome mismatch of the barrels with the steel charges in the cylindrical carrier. However, this proved very unsatisfactory. Recovered projectiles often showed no engraving marks of the rifling and generally struck the target sideways. An attempt was made to remedy this by increasing the taper and reducing the bore at the muzzle.

Tests and Demonstrations - The Gatling and Mr. Rindge, one of his six partners, demonstrated the gun themselves. They made no attempt to conceal the characteristics or construction of the weapon but published fully illustrated accounts of its design and performance. These eventually found their way to all parts of the world, and aroused foreign inquiry. Nevertheless, our military authorities did not consider the invention especially desirable.
On one of his numerous trips to Washington to interest the Army, Gatling called on Brig. Gen. J.W. Ripley, Chief of Ordnance, and asked that the weapon be given tests with a view of adopting it. General Ripley refused point blank to take the gun under consideration: no doubt he was influenced by confidential reports on the inventor's southern sympathies at much as by any other factor.
A few days later, one of Gatling's representatives met Gen. Benjamin F. Butler in Baltimore, and asked permission to demonstrate the weapon. At the same time he neglected to mention that Gen. Ripley's refusal to become interested. Butler was enthusiastic over the resulting exhibition. He immediately purchased 12 guns paying $12,000 for the weapons, on carriages, complete with 12,000 rounds of ammunition, and personally directed their use in battle during the siege of Petersburg, Va.
Gatling was not the type to hide his light under a bushel. Ever the opportunist, he had written to Maj. R. Maldon of the French Royal Artillery as early as 29 October 1863, suggesting the devastating possibilities of his gun in warfare, and enclosing a full and accurate description of the weapon. He proposed that should the major think it ethical, this might be the appropriate time to show the description and drawings to the Emperor Napoleon III.
Gatling did not have to wait long for a reply. A request, in the name of the French Government, promptly came making specific inquiry on test reports, type of ammunition, the kind considered best for field conditions, proof of reliability, and the possibility of obtaining one of the weapons with ammunition for conducting a conclusive test.
It is of particular interest that the text of the letter showed the keen awareness of the French Government toward this gun. Its observers during the Civil War, knowing the effectiveness of grapeshot fired from cannon against personnel had recognized the need for an even more efficient weapon. Undoubtedly they had already dispatched information concerning the Gatling gun to their own ordnance department, and discussed the possibility of its deadly use in European warfare.
To the French inquiry, GatlGatling's correspondence with the French authorities definitely proves that his gun was known to the French high command as early as October, 1863.
This occurred considerably before Napoleon III ordered Commandant de Reffye, the leading French ordnance engineer, to produce a weapon that would actually do what records of tests and statements of individuals claimed was possible for the Gatling. It is conclusive proof that Gatling had a reliable and practical weapon for military use, long before any similar gun of European origin was beyond the blueprint stage.
With the hope of getting the necessary Union authorities interested in the matter, Gatling wrote President Lincoln, and pointed out that his deadly invention was an act of Providence for suppressing the rebellion in short order.
This brings to light a peculiar thing about the personality of this extraordinary man. At the same time he was describing his gun as the tool of Providence to help the North defeat the South, Army authorities were investigating his personal life. Henry B. Carrington, commanding general of the District of Indiana, reported that Gatling belonged to the Order of American Knights, a group of Confederate sympathizers busily engaged in aiding the Southern cause by way acts of sabotage; and described Dr. Gatling, 'inventor of the gun so named,' and the jailer of Louisville, Ky., as the most active and dangerous of the entire organization. Furthermore, he reported that at Louisville a Federal supply boat had been recently burned by them.
Having been born in North Carolina, Gatling's loyalties were naturally assumed to be with the South. This is believed to have influenced the location of his place of manufacture in Cincinnati, on the opposite side of the Ohio River from the South. Should he have gotten into quantity production, it would be a strategic position for selling his product to both the North and the South. He could either have delivered guns, or let them be seized in his shop by a quick Southern raid.
Whatever his incentive was for locating in Cincinnati, nothing materialized. Gatling did not receive from the armed services of either side the recognition he expected. Therefore his production was meager. However, during this period his gun was given an official trial at the Washington Navy Yard and was successful enough for Admiral Dahlgren to approve the weapon's adoption by any fleet or squadron commander who requisitioned it." - Chinn

"Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling invented the Gatling in 1861. Although qualified in medicine he never practiced, and spent most of his life inventing, though of all his inventions only the gun has survived to perpetuate his name, his stem-plough, hemp-breaker and rice-planter having faded from view.
Gatling more or less took the Ager system of loading a cartridge by a forward stroke of a crank and applied it to a metallic cartridge. He also appreciated the point about the heating effect of firing pounds of gunpowder in a barrel, and arranged his gun to have six barrels, which would be fired in turn. Thus if the gun had a rate of fire of, say, 300 rounds per minute, any one barrel would only be firing at 50 rpm, and it would have an opportunity to cool down during the time that the other five were being fired. The six barrels were mounted around a central axis, and behind them was the loading and firing arrangement operated by a crank at the side of the gun. The cartridges were placed into a feeding unit revolved, projections in the bolt, riding in the g to move round, the bolt was closed by the cam groove and the cartridge was forced into the gun chamber.
The bolt was then locked and as the barrel reached the bottom-most position the cam tripped the firing pin and the cartridge was fired. Then as the barrel began to move up the other side of the circle the bolt was unlocked and opened, the cartridge case extracted and ejected, and it arrived once more at the top, empty, ready to be reloaded. It should perhaps be said that this description is of the perfected Gatling; the first models, understandably, were not quite so neat and tidy, although they were quite serviceable. General Ben Butler thought sufficient of them to buy 12 (at $1000 apiece), which he used successfully at the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia, but apart from that the Gatling gun made little headway during the Civil War; it seems that both sides suspected Dr. Gatling's sympathies."- Hogg

"The U.S. Army adopted its first Gatling Gun shortly after it was invented in 1862. Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling carefully explained that his gun was the best way to cut down the size of the Union Army, and this was a most humanitarian motive because many more soldiers died of disease during the Civil War than were killed by hostile action. The Army's first 12 Gatlings were cal..58 guns brought in 1863. These guns fired a cartridge almost identical to the Ager round. The inspiration for the Gatling came for the revolving pistol called the 'pepper box,' but the resemblance is slight. Gatling's concept was to have a set of several barrels with individual bolts revolve in a frame that had a cam to make the bolts close, fire, and open - combined with a feed mechanism to provide cartridges as fast as the gun could shoot them.
Gatling Guns were fired at Confederate troops in the Petersburg Campaign that ended the Civil War and in a couple of other actions. It was not considered an effective weapon, or a practical one, and the soldiers tended to class it as an expensive toy. Although the guns were clumsy, heavy, and hard to operate this wasn't the real problem with them; the trouble was that the soldiers of the period didn't have the slightest idea how to employ them in combat. None of the Civil War guns were used enough for anyone to realize how to take tactical advantage of them, and when the war ended soldiers considered the machine gun as a special form of artillery." - Konrad F. Schreier

"The one man we think of in connection with the manually operated machine-gun was Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, who trained as a physician at Laporte, Indiana, but apparently never practiced. He already had a string of successful inventions - most agricultural machines - to his name when, in 1861, he turned his attention to the field of weaponry. Like Ager, he settled on the proven revolving cylinder as a means of presenting the fresh cartridge to the barrel and hammer/firing pin for his gun, and also like Ager he experienced problems with feeding cartridges - then still waxed paper parcels containing powder and bullet - which, for the demanding purposes of the repeating gun, were inserted into heavy-walled steel tubes. These were sealed and pierced at the base, which was recessed to hold a percussion cap, the entire package being presented to the barrel by the revolving breech mechanism and functioning at a sort of disposable chamber, being expelled after the round it contained was expended and subsequently recharged. Both the Ager and the first Gatling guns adopted this approach, as did many of the others.
There is nothing to suggest that Gatling's first gun, the prototype of which was demonstrated in Indianapolis in the autumn of 1862, was any better in general than any of its competitors, and it was not until the adoption of the composite metal cartridge, with a more-or-less pointed projectile crimped inThe one virtue of the paper cartridge was that it burned to (almost) nothing, along with the charge it contained; copper and later brass cartridge cases, on the other hand, had to be removed from the chamber after they had been discharged. To make removal easier they were rimmed at their base, and could thus be gripped by an extractor claw, and a variety of mechanisms to effect this were produced. The best solution was the bolt action, soon to be virtually universal for rifles, which eject the spent case and loaded the next round from the magazine in the single backwards-and forwards movement of a cartridge-follower.
Gatling's genius was to take that simple development and adapt it to the revolving mechanism of his machine gun. In fact, he redesigned the gun completely, realizing that he could combine chamber and barrel together, assemble a group of barrels axially around a central rod and turn the whole lot, thus solving the problems of alignment he had encountered when turning a loaded multi-chambered cylinder to match up with a single barrel. A simple fixed cam moved the bolts in each chamber backwards (on their way up from the 'six o' clock' position, where the round was fired) and forwards again, (on their way down from the 'twelve o' clock' position, where by-now-empty chamber was replenished, ejection of the spent case having been accomplished by about ten o'clock) while the operator turned a handle to rotate the barrel-and-chamber assembly. It could not have been simpler, and it worked - usually - like a dream. Said Dr. Gatling two years later, with no false modesty and in perfect truth: 'The gun can be discharged at the rate of two hundred shots per minute and it bears the same relation to other firearms that McCormack's Reaper does to the sickle or the sewing machine does to the common needle. A few men with it can perform the work of a regiment.'" - Roger Ford

"The initial model of Gatling's gun, patented in 1862, had six barrels, which were rotated around a central axis by the action of a hand crank. The lack of commercially available metallic cartridges forced Gatling to design his gun to use steel casings similar to those used in the Union repeating gun. Charged with a paper cartridge, primed with a percussion cap on a nipple on the rear and then loaded into a drum on top of the gun, the casings were gravity-fed into position behind the gun barrels. As the barrel assembly rotated, the loading casings were cammed forward against the barrels, fired, and then ejected into a hopper where they were held for reloading.
Presumably inspired at least in part by the design of Samuel Colt's revolver, the Gatling leaked gas at the point where the steel casing joined the rear of the gun barrel. This flaw would be corrected by the development of the self-contained metallic cartridge, which fitted into the rear of the gun barrel and sealed the breech on firing. Multibarrel design and heavy construction required by the state of metallurgy in the 1860s made the Gatling gun, like other similar machine guns, too heavy to be carried by hand. Mounted on a carriage similar to that used by light artillery pieces. Gatling guns closely resembled conventional artillery....Having dealt with his money and manufacturing problems, Gatling using the spring of 1863 to demonstrate the capabilities of his invention. Several trips to Washington, together with additional correspondence, represented a renewed assault upon an indifferent War Department. Rebuffed in Washington, Gatling at length persuaded Maj. Gen. Horatio C. Wright, commanding general of the Department of Ohio, to inspect the new weapon. WrighCaptivated by the possibilities presented by new weapons although unable to exploit their potential, Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler agreed to purchase twelve Gatling and twelve thousand rounds of ammunitions. Ordered in mid-summer 1863, at a cost of $12,000, the guns were delivered to Butler's Army of the James and used briefly in May 1864. Butler's order plus the purchase of a few Gatlings for use on naval vessels gave Gatling some business but did nothing to ignite interest in the weapon within the Ordnance Department.
Perhaps because he did not really understand the workings of the Washington bureaucracy, Gatling had limited his attempts to gain official attention for his weapon to applications to various branches of the military. When in early 1864 the inventor finally asked President Lincoln to consider his weapon, he was perhaps a year too late. Conscious of the increasing strength of the Union military position, concerned with the problems of the upcoming presidential election, and affected by repeated collisions with the adamantine Ripley, Lincoln had lost interest in new weapons. He gave Gatling no help." - David A. Armstrong

As far as is known, the only Gatling Guns in Army Service were those sold to General Butler late in 1863. According to Gatling, "Some of them, however, did get into service before the close of the American war, and were used effectively in repelling rebel attacks upon the Union forces, under command of General Butler, near Richmond, Virginia."
In 1867, Case, Lockwood and Company, of Hartford, Connecticut, published (presumably for Colt's, by then manufacturing the Gatling Gun) a promotional brochure entitled Gatling's Battery Gun. The contains the following quotation from the Indianapolis Journal:
'THE GATLING GUN - Our dispatches to-day state that the Gatling gun was used with terrible effect upon the rebels in repelling a recent assault upon our works on James river. So far as we know this is the first time this formidable invention has ever had a chance to exhibit its power, though it has been tested and approved fifty times. No one who has seen it has doubted that in destructive energy it would prove equal to a regiment of men, and that its lightness and facility of handling would enable it to be used where a regiment could not be placed, and be moved with a rapidity that no regiment, not even cavalry, could equal.'
No date is given for this excerpt and the original could not be found.
With Grant and Lee engaged in the bloody Wilderness campaign, in May, 1864, General Butler, commanding the Army of the James, advanced on the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia. On May 16, his army was defeated by Drewrys Bluff by a much smaller Confederate force under General Beauregard. Butler retreated to Bermuda Hundred, a fishing village on the peninsula at the confluence of the Appomattox and James rivers, north-northeast of Petersburg, Virginia. Here he was bottled up by Beauregard and earned a new nickname, 'Bottled-up' Butler (perhaps and improvement over 'Beast,' but under the circumstances just as unflattering). Butler remained at Bermuda Hundred until Grant crossed the James and advanced on Petersburg June 12-16. This campaign, in which Ben Butler hardly covered himself with glory, is the one in which the Gatlings were used - apparently without causing Beauregard much trouble.
It is interesting to note that, in the autobiographical Butler's Book, no mention whatever is made of the Gatling Guns, for which Butler spent $12,000. We have, however, an eyewitness account of an instance of the employment of the Gatling by General Butler in Virginia. In the unpublished 'Personal Recollections' of Capt. Gustave S. Dana, Signal Corps (Regular Army), attached to the staff of Maj. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore, commandin'The entrenchments we had erected were from the Appomattox to the James across the neck of land at its narrowest part west of Bermuda Hundred, and the position was described by General Grant as being 'corked up in a bottle.' Beauregard had entrenched across the front of us and our salients were at one point only thirty yards apart. My signal party were stationed at these batteries to direct each other's fire and to communicate with the Navy and our various headquarters. Nearly every day there would be a fierce attack from one side or the other, sometimes the Rebels getting over our works and sometimes we over theirs. I saw General Butler testing the Gatling gun, which was a new thing then, upon some unarmed and unsuspecting Rebels who were strolling up and down the top of their earthworks talking to our men in the rifle pits during one of those mutually agreed upon armistice the enlisted men used to have. It brought on quite an artillery duel....'
This incident, from its context, must have occurred during the latter part of May, 1864, after Butler's defeat at Drewrys Bluff and his retreat to Bermuda Hundred." - Paul Wahl & Don Toppel

LOAN HISTORY:
ARMY #1365 - WEAPON LOANED TO U.S. NAVAL AND MARINE CORPS RESERVE TRAINING CENTER, 211 CASE ST., SPRINGFIELD, MA. 4/8/57 TO 4/15/57.

References:
Armstrong, David A. BULLETS AND BUREAUCRATS: THE MACHINE GUN AND THE UNITED STATES ARMY, 1861-1916. Greenwood Press. Westport, Ct. 1982.
Chinn, George M. THE MACHINE GUN. Vol. I. Department of the Navy. Washington, D.C. 1951.
Ellis, John. THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN. John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, Md. 1986.
Ford, Roger. THE GRIM REAPER: MACHINE GUNS AND MACHINE-GUNNERS IN ACTION. Sarpedon. N.Y., N.Y. 1996.
Hogg, Ian V. MACHINE GUNS: A DETAILED HISTORY OF THE RAPID-FIRE GUN 14TH CENTURY TO PRESENT. Krause Publications. Iola, Wi. 2002.
Schreier, Jr., Konrad. F. GUIDE TO UNITED STATES MACHINE GUNS. Normount Technical Publications. Wickenburg, Az. 1975.
Wahl, Paul & Don Toppel. THE GATLING GUN. Arco Publishing Co., Inc. N.Y., N.Y. 1965.