Gatling Gun Model 1862

Colt's Manufacturing · Machine Gun · Discontinued · 1862

Also known as: M1862 Gatling, Gatling Battery Gun, Gatling's Battery Gun, Gorloff Gun

Overview

The Gatling Gun Model 1862 is the iconic hand-cranked, multi-barrel rapid-fire weapon patented by Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling in November 1862 and the progenitor of the modern machine gun. Operation is mechanical rather than self-loading: an operator turns a side-mounted hand crank that rotates a cluster of six rifled barrels around a central axis, while cam-driven bolts sequentially chamber, fire, extract, and eject cartridges from each barrel as it passes the top of rotation. Each barrel has its own dedicated firing lock with an internal hammer and striker, so at any given instant one barrel is firing while the others are in various stages of loading and cooling - the design that let the M1862 achieve sustained rates of fire around 200 rounds per minute without melting its barrels, with later models reaching 400+ rpm. The original M1862 was chambered in a paper-cartridge .58 caliber loaded into gravity-fed steel 'cartridge chambers', and production M1865/M1866 versions switched to metallic .58 rimfire and then .50-70 Government centerfire rounds fed from a top-mounted Broadwell drum or, in later guns, the Accles or Bruce positive-feed drum. The weapon is mounted on a two-wheeled artillery carriage with an elevating screw for traverse and elevation, weighs roughly 78 kg for the gun alone (well over 450 kg with carriage and limber), and requires a full crew to emplace, aim, feed, and crank. Because the cyclic rate depends entirely on how fast the gunner turns the crank, firing is classified as a manually-operated repeating action rather than semi-automatic or full-automatic - there is no gas, recoil, or blowback mechanism. Chamberings evolved across variants to keep pace with U.S. service ammunition: .58 rimfire, .50-70 Government, .45-70 Government, and eventually .30 Army (.30-40 Krag) by the late 1890s. Though it saw only limited use in the American Civil War (Gatling's Southern birth and suspected Confederate sympathies kept Union adoption slow until 1866), the Gatling became a fixture of the Indian Wars, the Anglo-Zulu War, the Russo-Turkish War, and most famously the Spanish-American War, where Lt. John H. Parker's Gatling Gun Detachment provided the suppressive fire credited by Theodore Roosevelt with enabling the Rough Riders' charge at the Battle of San Juan Hill. The U.S. Army finally declared the Gatling obsolete in 1911, superseded by true recoil- and gas-operated machine guns, but the rotary-barrel concept Gatling patented returned in the 20th century as the electrically-driven M61 Vulcan and GAU-8 Avenger.

Specifications

Weight (empty)78020 g (2752.1 oz)
Overall Length1346 mm (52.99")
Barrel Length1067 mm (42.01")
Firing MechanismHammer Fired
Magazine Capacity400 rounds
Magazine TypeDrum
Muzzle Velocity290 m/s (951 fps)
Muzzle Energy1362 J (1005 ft·lbf)
Effective Range900 m (984 yd)
Maximum Range1800 m (1968 yd)
Rate of Fire200 rpm
Barrel RiflingRight Hand
Frame MaterialBrass
Barrel MaterialSteel
FinishBlued And Brass

Calibers

Features

Variants

Service history

Operators

Conflicts

Production

Estimated total produced: 10,000 · Production years: 1862-1911

Approximate total across all U.S. Gatling variants through 1911, including Colt-manufactured guns and licensed production abroad (Paget in Russia, Grant in Austria, Armstrong in Britain). Original 1862 hand-built pre-production guns numbered only a handful before the Cincinnati factory fire destroyed the first six prototypes; Colt took over manufacture in 1866 and produced the vast majority of surviving Gatlings.

Origin

Country of origin: United States

Designer: Richard Jordan Gatling

Discontinued: 1911

Notes

Action type is not a standard enum value - the Gatling is a hand-cranked six-barrel rotary mechanism where an external crank drives a cam that cycles independent bolts past a stationary feed point. Not gas-operated, not recoil-operated, not blowback. Recorded here as firing_mode 'manual' with rate_of_fire reflecting a skilled crank operator on the M1862 (later variants with Bruce feed reached 400-1000 rpm). Caliber figures for .58 rimfire are approximate - the cartridge was non-standardized and varied by contract.

Background

Dr. Richard Gatling, a North Carolina-born physician and inventor, claimed he designed the gun to reduce the size of armies and thus the carnage of war - reasoning that one man with a Gatling could do the work of a hundred riflemen, and that the resulting demonstration of industrial lethality would make nations think twice about going to war. The logic did not survive contact with reality, but the gun itself did: at the Battle of San Juan Hill on 1 July 1898, Lt. John Parker's four Gatlings poured roughly 18,000 rounds into Spanish positions in under nine minutes, and Theodore Roosevelt - watching from the slopes with his Rough Riders - later wrote that the sound of the Gatlings opening up was the most welcome noise he had ever heard and credited them directly with winning the charge.