Richard Jordan Gatling was born on September 12, 1818, and died on February 26, 1903. He was an American inventor who is most famous for creating the Gatling gun, which is recognized as the first successful machine gun ever made.
Life
Richard Gatling was born in Hertford County, North Carolina, in 1818 and was raised in the Methodist Church. At the age of 21, he designed a screw propeller for steamboats, not knowing that someone else had already patented a similar design months earlier. While living in North Carolina, he worked in the county clerk's office, briefly taught school, and later became a merchant. At 36, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where he worked in a dry goods store and invented a rice-sowing machine and a wheat drill, a tool that helped farmers plant wheat more efficiently. These inventions helped change farming methods across the country. After recovering from an illness called smallpox, Gatling became interested in medicine. He graduated from the Ohio Medical College in 1850 with a medical degree, but he never practiced medicine. Instead, he focused on becoming an inventor.
When the Civil War began in 1861, Gatling was living in Indianapolis, Indiana. There, he worked to improve firearms. That same year, he invented the Gatling gun. A year later, he started the Gatling Gun Company.
By the early 1850s, Gatling had achieved enough success in business to propose marriage to Jemima Sanders, who was 19 years younger than him and the daughter of a well-known Indianapolis doctor. They married on October 25, 1854. Her older sister, Zerelda, was married to David Wallace, the governor of Indiana. Gatling was an active member of his Masonic lodge, Center Lodge No. 23.
Later in life, Gatling patented inventions to improve toilets, bicycles, steam-cleaning of raw wool, pneumatic power, and many other areas. In 1891, he was chosen as the first president of the American Association of Inventors and Manufacturers and served for six years. Although he was wealthy when he died, he had made and lost several fortunes through his investments.
In his final years, Gatling returned to St. Louis, Missouri, to start a new company that made steam plows, or tractors. While visiting his daughter in New York City and meeting with his patent agency, Gatling died at his daughter's home on February 26, 1903. He was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
The U.S. Navy honored Gatling's contributions during World War II by naming a Fletcher Class Destroyer, DD-671, the USS Gatling.
Inventions
While best known for inventing the Gatling gun, Richard Gatling also created and patented several other inventions. These include a screw propeller and a wheat drill (a planting device) in 1839, a hemp break machine in 1850, a steam plow (a steam tractor) in 1857, the Gatling gun in 1861, a marine steam ram in 1862, and a motor-driven plow (a tractor) in later years.
Gatling invented the Gatling gun after he noticed that many soldiers in the Civil War died from disease rather than from bullets. In 1877, he wrote, "I thought if I could make a machine gun that could fire quickly enough for one person to do the work of many soldiers, it might reduce the need for large armies and help protect soldiers from battle and disease."
The gun was inspired by Gatling’s seed planter. A working model was built in 1861. In 1862, he started the Gatling Gun Company in Indianapolis, Indiana, to sell the gun. Six early models were destroyed in a fire in December 1862, but Gatling arranged for thirteen more to be made at a different factory. Although the gun was created during the Civil War, it saw little use. This was partly because some people accused Gatling of being a copperhead due to his North Carolina background, but this was never proven. Gatling was not connected to the Confederate government or military and did not live in the South during the war.
General Benjamin F. Butler bought 12 guns, and Admiral David Dixon Porter bought one. It was not until 1866 that the U.S. government officially purchased Gatling guns. In 1870, Gatling sold the rights to his Gatling gun patents to Colt. He remained president of the Gatling Gun Company until it was fully taken over by Colt in 1897. In 1893, Gatling patented a new version of the gun that used an electric motor instead of a hand crank, allowing it to fire 300 rounds per minute. The hand-cranked model was no longer used by the U.S. Army in 1911. Later, the design was improved and combined with electric power in the M61 Vulcan. This weapon led to many variations, including versions that could fire bullets as small as 5.56 mm or as large as 37 mm, and some that used gas-powered systems.