This is an I-Heart podcast.

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.

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 gun.

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, Gatling 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.

...