Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It
Barton C. Hacker, Julia Keller · Journal of American History · 2009
Everyone has heard of the Gatling gun, but few know much about the man who invented it. So claims Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Keller to justify her foray into interpreting nineteenth-century America history through Richard Jordan Gatling's life. She's probably right about the greater fame of gun than man. He has no full length biography, popular or academic, although the basic facts of his life are easy to learn, largely because his famous gun makes him an automatic encyclopedia entry. Born in 1818, Gatling grew up on his father's prosperous North Carolina cotton plantation. He left for a job in town at age fifteen and never returned. In 1844, at age twenty-six, he patented a seed planter that proved quite successful; it was the first of many successes. A near-fatal bout with smallpox in 1846 led to medical studies. Although he appears never to have graduated nor practiced medicine, he henceforth styled himself Dr. Gatling. Resettling in Indianapolis, he married into the local elite and prospered. There in 1862 he invented his famous gun, which saw some service during the Civil War, though not adopted by the U.S. Army until 1866, the first of many adoptions worldwide. But the reign of the Gatling gun was short-lived. However well designed, well built, and reliable, a hand-cranked (or even motor-driven) gun could not compete with the true machine gun introduced by Hiram Maxim in the mid-1880s. When Gatling died in 1903, his gun had largely vanished from active service, and his memory soon faded.