Richard Gatling’s Humane Machine Gun

In 1862, American inventor Richard Gatling patented the Gatling gun, one of the first successful rapid-fire weapons, while the Civil War raged in the United States. He believed that a faster-firing gun would allow smaller armies to fight wars, which in his mind would reduce the number of soldiers who died from disease and battle. Gatling argued that his gun could actually save lives by shrinking the size of armies required for modern warfare. Instead, his design became a prototype for later automatic weapons and helped usher in a new, more lethal era of industrialized combat.

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