Gatling, Richard Jordan

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Richard Jordan Gatling
    Place of Birth
    Burial Place
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Slave State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    No. of Children
    3
    Family
    Jordan Gatling (father), Mary Barnes (mother), Jemima T. Sanders (wife, 1854)
    Education
    Other
    Other Education
    Indiana Medical College, Laporte, IN; Ohio Medical College, Cincinnati, OH
    Occupation
    Businessman
    Scientist or Inventor
    Doctor, Dentist or Nurse

    Richard Jordan Gatling (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    With the coming of the Civil War, Gatling began working on improvements in weaponry. His first inventions in this area were a marine steam ram and a rapid-fire, or machine gun, with which his name has ever since been identified; both were patented in 1862. The gun may have been invented because of a suggestion of Colonel R. A. Maxwell that the Union army would require just such a specialized weapon during the coming war. Before the end of that same year, he had produced a working model of this weapon, a hand-cranked .58 caliber version with six barrels, rotated around a central axis. Cartridges dropped from a drum atop the gun and were automatically fed into each barrel. The rate of fire was 350 rounds per minute, but there were problems with accuracy, and the weapon sometimes jammed when fired too rapidly. This was owing in large part to the use of the then-common paper cartridges.
    Keir B. Sterling, "Gatling, Richard Jordan," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-00589.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Gatling, Richard Jordan," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5718.