This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

Richard Gatling hoped that the tremendous power of his new Civil War weapon

would discourage large-scale battles and show the folly of war. What would happen? Here to tell the

story of Gatling is Ashley Lubinsky. Take it away, Ashley.

Thank you. Take it away, Ashley. There aren't sufficient words to describe the horrible tragedies that befell Americans during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, with an estimated of over 600,000 dead in just four short years.

At the beginning of the war, a colonel and a dentist wondered if there could be a weapon so terrible

that it would deter warfare from continuing.

That dentist was Richard Jordan Gatling, and he decided to take on that task with his invention that bore his name,

The Gatling Guns.

Born in 1818 in North Carolina,

Gatling showed a lot of promise for inventing pretty early on.

He created improvements on steamboats and also different agricultural equipment.

Although, after about a smallpox, Gowling decided to shift to a career in medicine, and he

earned his MD in 1850 from the Ohio Medical College, but he actually never practiced as a doctor.

In 1861, Galing took out a patent for repeating rifle battery.

Now, people often incorrectly cite the Gatling gun as a machine gun, although that definition

is misleading.

A machine gun itself fires continuously with one trigger press, but Gatling's gun operated

with a hand crank at the back of the gun.

So the gun was seated onto a carriage. It was a very, very large piece of artillery, and it had

multiple barrels that were affixed around a central access, similar to that of a cylinder

on a revolver. And the rate of fire was about 200 rounds per minute on the initial Gatling guns, although you could kind of say that the rate of fire was about 200 rounds per minute on the initial gatling guns,

...