Richard Jordan Gatling

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Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling
Born	September 12, 1818 Hertford County, North Carolina
Died	February 26, 1903 (84 years old) New York City
Nationality	American
Known for	The Gatling gun

Richard Jordan Gatling (September 12, 1818 – February 26, 1903) was an American inventor best known for his invention of the Gatling gun, the first successful machine gun.

Life

Gatling was born in the Maney's Neck section Hertford County, North Carolina, in 1818 to Jordan Gatling, a slaveholder who owned an almost completely self-sufficient plantation containing more than a thousand acres, and Mary Barnes Gatling. He had three brothers (Thomas B., James Henry, and William J.) and two sisters (Mary Ann and Martha). his father was also an inventor and in 1835 patented machines for planting and for thinning cotton. His older brother James Henry designed and constructed a crude hand-powered aircraft with which he experimented unsuccessfully and also invented and patented devices for chopping cotton stalks and for converting pine into lightwood.

He had brief formal education at Buckhorn, a local common school, after which he worked in the county clerk’s office before becoming a schoolmaster, but he gave up teaching to open a country store near the town of Winton. After observing an experimental steamboat trial while on a visit to Norfolk in 1841, he conceived the principle of the screw propeller as a substitute for the slow and cumbersome paddle-type wheels then in use. At first his father refused him permission to go to Washington to patent his invention, but relented seven months later. When Gatling finally arrived in Washington, he learned that Scandinavian-American inventor John Ericsson had patented the identical invention only a few days before.

At the age of 36, Gatling moved to St. Louis, Missouri where he worked in a dry goods store and invented a rice-sowing machine and a wheat drill (machines to aid in planting rice and wheat, respectively). The introduction of these machines garnered Gatling a fortune and did much to revolutionize the agricultural system in the country.

During the winter of 1845, Gatling contracted smallpox while on a business trip by riverboat and was unable to obtain medical attention for two weeks, while the steamer was icebound. Upon recovering from this near-fatal illness, he decided to study medicine simply to be able to care for himself and his family. He attended both Indiana Medical College and Ohio Medical College before graduating from the Ohio Medical College in 1850 with an MD. Although he had his MD, he never practiced; he was more interested in a career as an inventor.

By the early 1850s, Gatling was successful enough in business to offer marriage to Jemima Sanders, 19 years younger than Gatling and the daughter of a prominent Indianapolis physician. They married on October 25, 1854. Her younger sister Zerelda was married to David Wallace, the governor of Indiana. An active member of his Masonic Lodge, he was member of Center Lodge No. 23.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Gatling was living in Indianapolis, Indiana. There he devoted himself to the perfection of firearms. In 1861, the same year the war started, he invented the Gatling gun. A year later, he founded the Gatling Gun Company.

An interesting aspect of Gatling's life is his conception of the meaning of his invention. When he invented his gun, he wished to reduce the number of men required to fight wars and thereby reduce deaths. At the beginning of the Civil War, Gatling would often visit trains bringing in casualties from the battlefields and army camps. From his examinations, he learned that only one in six died from their bullet wounds; the remainder died from fever, pneumonia, and other illnesses and infection. The loss of life due to illness impressed Gatling with the idea that, if a weapon could be devised to shoot more bullets, fewer men would be needed to fight wars and, therefore, fewer and smaller concentrations of men would be necessary. This, he contended, would reduce the rate of death by both illness and combat. He also hoped that the terror created by such a weapon would tend to discourage war altogether.

Later in his life, Gatling patented inventions to improve toilets, bicycles, steam-cleaning of raw wool, pneumatic power, and many other fields. He was elected as the first president of the American Association of Inventors and Manufacturers in 1891, serving for six years. Although still quite wealthy at the time of his death, he made and lost several fortunes by his investments.

In his final years, Gatling moved back to St. Louis, Missouri, to form a new company for manufacturing his steam plows, or tractors. While in New York City to visit his daughter and to talk with his patent agency, Gatling died at his daughter's home on February 26, 1903. He is interred at the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.

His contributions were commemorated by the U.S. Navy during WWII when the Fletcher Class Destroyer DD-671 was christened the USS Gatling.

Inventions

While being most known for inventing the Gatling gun, Gatling invented and patented a number of other inventions. His inventions include a screw propeller and a wheat drill (a planting device) in 1839, a hemp break machine in 1850, a steam plow (steam tractor) in 1857, the Gatling gun in 1861, a marine steam ram in 1862, and a motor-driven plow (tractor).

Gatling gun

Main article: Gatling gun

Gatling invented the Gatling gun after he noticed that a majority of the soldiers fighting in the Civil War were lost to disease rather than gunshots. In 1877, he wrote:

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.

Although Gatling's humanitarian theories have proven naive, the humanitarian concept of his invention was accepted in many respectable quarters, particularly in England where the Gatling gun was adopted early. A British newspaper of the period commented: "The general use of the formidable weapon will tend to diminish the barbarity and actual carnage of warfare, as its known relentless certainty of execution will help to prevent wars and thereby aid in keeping the peace of Christendom."

The gun was based on Gatling’s seed planter. A working prototype was developed in 1861. In 1862, he founded the Gatling Gun Company in Indianapolis, Indiana to market the gun. The first six production guns were destroyed during a fire in December 1862 at the factory. All six of them had been manufactured at Gatling's expense. Undaunted, Gatling arranged for another 13 to be manufactured at the Cincinnati Type Factory.

Though the gun was developed during the Civil War, it saw very little action. This is partly because Gatling was accused of being a copperhead because of his North Carolina roots, but this was never proven. Gatling was never affiliated with the Confederate States government or military, nor did he live in the South during the Civil War. Although General Benjamin F. Butler bought 12 and Admiral David Dixon Porter bought one, it wasn't until 1866 that the US Government officially purchased Gatling guns. In 1870 he sold his patents for the Gatling gun to Colt. Gatling remained president of the Gatling Gun Company until it was fully absorbed by Colt in 1897. In 1893, Gatling patented a Gatling gun that replaced the hand cranked mechanism with an electric motor, a relatively new invention at the time, achieving a rate of fire of 3,000 rounds per minute.

The hand-cranked Gatling gun was declared obsolete by the United States Army in 1911. Decades later, after World War II, the mechanical concept was resurrected and wedded to electricity-driven cranking in the M61 Vulcan.

Further reading

• Julia Keller. 2008. Mr Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-01894-9