Richard Gatling This Doctor Built a Gatling Gun. He Thought It Would Save Lives.

Richard Jordan Gatling was born in North Carolina in 1818. He started as an inventor of farm machines, including a seed planter, studied medicine after a bout of smallpox and qualified as a doctor, but never practised. In Indianapolis during the Civil War he saw the troops go off and the wounded, the sick and the dead come back, most of them killed by disease rather than in battle. His answer was a machine that would let one man do the work of a hundred, so armies could be smaller and fewer men would die in the camps. His six-barrel, hand-cranked gun used the feed from his seed planter. Each barrel loaded, fired and cooled in turn, at about 200 rounds a minute. He patented it on 4 November 1862. Weeks later a fire destroyed his first guns, and rumours spread that the Southern-born inventor was a Confederate sympathiser (never proven). The army refused it, but General Benjamin Butler bought twelve himself, and they were used in the trenches at Petersburg. The US Army adopted it in 1866. After that it went around the world: the British Empire, the Spanish–American War, and even strikes at home. Armies did not get smaller, and the machine guns that followed made war deadlier than ever. Gatling sold his patents to Colt, kept inventing (ploughs, bicycles, an improved toilet) and died in New York in 1903. In 1911 the US Army declared his gun obsolete. Today the M61 Vulcan spins six barrels with an electric motor at up to 6,000 rounds a minute.

The gun in the opening is the Gatling at Fort Laramie National Historic Site. No images of the dead are shown.