How does a gatling gun operate




















Morris, A. Ballweg, and D. Rose tested the gun at Indiana Governor Oliver P. James Wolfe Ripley, Union Army chief of ordnance. Ripley born in considered repeating weapons unnecessarily expensive inventions that encouraged ammunition waste, thereby overburdening the Army supply system.

In a February 18, , letter to Lincoln, Gatling pleaded his case with a swipe at his competition :. Always pragmatic and facing reelection, Lincoln feared Gatling being in league with Copperheads.

Already the creator of innovative home and farm implements, Gatling turned his prodigious creative talents to warfare in A direct appeal by Gatling produced no U. Still, it remains widely claimed that at least some Gatlings saw combat use. It is asserted that Union Army of the James commander Maj. Benjamin F. Butler allegedly mounted up to eight on Union James River gunboats. Even then, no claim has been made that those gunboat Gatlings were fired in anger during combat.

Richard Gatling, in the 's. They are both. Richard Jordan Gatling also invented a screw propeller, a cotton planter and a steam plow in addition to his famous Gatling gun which the US Patent office termed a machine gun.

It was not a machine gun in the modern use of terms, however. A Minigun is a variation of the Gatling gun. The original Gatling gun was magazine fed and hand cranked, whereas the Minigun, Microgun, Vulcan, etc.

The first model was in , but improved models of the Gatling Gun were made in following years. Gatling gun. Richard Gatling used it first. He invented it. Apparently not, the first recorded use of the Gatling Gun in combat is at the siege of Petersburg a year later. Log in. US Civil War. War and Military History. Languages and Cultures. See Answer. Best Answer. Study guides. Q: How does the gatling gun work? Write your answer Related questions. How did Richard j gatling make the gatling gun?

Who and when was the Gatling Gun invented? Who was Gatling gun named after? When was the Gatling gun invented? Why was the gatling gun named after gatling? What is the difference between a minigun and a Gatling gun? We'll discuss this in more detail later. But first, let's take a look at how all of this works -- in a revolver. In the last section, we saw that a cartridge consists of a primer, a propellant and a projectile, all in one metal package.

This simple device is the foundation of most modern firearms. To see how this works, let's look at a standard double-action revolver. This gun has a revolving cylinder, with six breeches for six cartridges. When you pull the trigger on a revolver, several things happen:. When the propellant explodes, the cartridge case expands. The case temporarily seals the breech, so all the expanding gas pushes forward rather than backward. Obviously, this sort of gun is easier to use than a flintlock or a percussion cap weapon.

You can load six shots at a time and you only have to pull the trigger to fire. But you're still fairly limited: You have to pull the trigger for every shot, and you need to reload after six shots although some modern revolvers can hold 10 rounds of ammunition.

You also have to eject the empty shells from the cylinders manually. In the s, gun manufacturers designed a number of mechanisms to address the problems associated with limited firing ability. A lot of these early machine guns combined several barrels and firing hammers into a single unit.

Among the most popular designs was the Gatling gun , named after its inventor Richard Jordan Gatling. This weapon -- the first machine gun to gain widespread popularity -- consists of six to 10 gun barrels positioned in a cylinder. Each barrel has its own breech and firing pin system.

To operate the gun, you turn a crank, which revolves the barrels inside the cylinder. Each barrel passes under an ammunition hopper , or carousel magazine , as it reaches the top of the cylinder. A new cartridge falls into the breech and the barrel is loaded. Each firing pin has a small cam head that catches hold of a slanted groove in the gun's body. As each barrel revolves around the cylinder, the groove pulls the pin backward, pushing in on a tight spring.

Just after a new cartridge is loaded into the breech, the firing-pin cam slides out of the groove and the spring propels it forward. The pin hits the cartridge, firing the bullet down the barrel.

When each barrel revolves around to the bottom of the cylinder, the spent cartridge shell falls out of an ejection port. The Gatling gun played an important role in several 19th century battles, but it wasn't until the early 20th century that the machine gun really established itself as a weapon to be reckoned with.

The Gatling gun is often considered a machine gun because it shoots a large number of bullets in a short amount of time.

But unlike modern machine guns, it isn't fully automatic: You have to keep cranking if you want to keep shooting. The first fully automatic machine gun is actually credited to an American named Hiram Maxim. Maxim's remarkable gun could shoot more than rounds per minute, giving it the firepower of about rifles.

The basic idea behind Maxim's gun, as well as the hundreds of machine gun designs that followed, was to use the power of the cartridge explosion to reload and re-cock the gun after each shot. There are three basic mechanisms for harnessing this power:. Click and hold the trigger to see how a recoil-action gun fires. For simplicity's sake, this animation doesn't show the cartridge loading, extraction and ejection mechanisms.

The first automatic machine guns had recoil-based systems. When you propel a bullet down the barrel, the forward force of the bullet has an opposite force that pushes the gun backward. In a gun built like a revolver , this recoil force just pushes the gun back at the shooter. But in a recoil-based machine gun, moving mechanisms inside the gun absorb some of this recoil force.

Here's the process: To prepare this gun to fire, you pull the breech bolt 1 back, so it pushes in the rear spring 2. The trigger sear 3 catches onto the bolt and holds it in place. The feed system runs an ammunition belt through the gun, loading a cartridge into the breech more on this later.

When you pull the trigger, it releases the bolt, and the spring drives the bolt forward. The bolt pushes the cartridge from the breech into the chamber.

The impact of the bolt firing pin on the cartridge ignites the primer, which explodes the propellant, which drives the bullet down the barrel. The barrel and the bolt have a locking mechanism that fastens them together on impact. In this gun, both the bolt and the barrel can move freely in the gun housing. The force of the moving bullet applies an opposite force on the barrel, pushing it and the bolt backward. As the bolt and barrel slide backward, they move past a metal piece that unlocks them.

When the pieces separate, the barrel spring 4 pushes the barrel forward, while the bolt keeps moving backward. The bolt is connected to an extractor , which removes the spent shell from the barrel. In a typical system, the extractor has a small lip that grips onto a narrow rim at the base of the shell.

As the bolt recoils, the extractor slides with it, pulling the empty shell backward. The backward motion of the bolt also activates the ejection system. The ejector's job is to remove the spent shell from the extractor and drive it out of an ejection port. When the spent shell is extracted, the feeding system can load a new cartridge into the breech.

If you keep the trigger depressed, the rear spring will drive the bolt against the new cartridge, starting the whole cycle over again. If you release the trigger, the sear will catch hold of the bolt and keep it from swinging forward.

Click and hold the trigger to see how a blowback-action gun fires. A blowback system is something like a recoil system, except that the barrel is fixed in the gun housing, and the barrel and bolt don't lock together. You can see how this mechanism works in the diagram below. This gun has a sliding bolt 3 held in place by a spring-driven cartridge magazine 5 , and a trigger mechanism 1. When you slide the bolt back, the trigger sear 2 holds it in place.

When you pull the trigger, the sear releases the bolt, and the spring drives it forward. After the bolt chambers the cartridge, the firing pin sets off the primer, which ignites the propellant. The explosive gas from the cartridge drives the bullet down the barrel.



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