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The Gun Brought Gatling Regret

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 28, 2008

"Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It," by Julia Keller (Viking, $25.95)

Confederate soldiers, observing the Gatling gun in action, said, "The Yankees have a gun you load on Monday and shoot all the rest of the week." Fortunately for them, their observances were limited, for the gun, despite its deadly effectiveness, was little used in the Civil War.

The Gatling gun, patented in November 1862 by Richard Jordan Gatling, was "the world's first machine gun that actually worked," Julia Keller writes. Though the man behind it has become obscure, "Gatling gun" still is heard as a metaphor for swift, unchecked activity.

In "Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel," Keller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, brings Gatling out from obscurity, explaining why and how he invented his gun. Horrified at seeing the return of wounded and dead Union soldiers to Indianapolis, where he was living at the time, Gatling resolved to perfect his idea of a rapid-fire weapon that, he thought, would save lives by reducing exposure to battle and the need for large armies.

But it scarcely got a tryout in the Civil War because the Union Army's chief of ordnance "was notoriously contemptuous of newfangled weapons." That despite glowing independent reports that it worked amazingly well. The first guns, manufactured in Cincinnati in November and December 1862, fired 200 rounds per minute from six barrels. The army did not adopt the gun until August 1866.

"Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel" combines biography and social and cultural history, with rather more of the latter than the former. A good deal of it is not strictly speaking necessary to an understanding of Gatling, his accomplishments or the times, such as a lengthy disquisition on the slow and wretched modes of transportation in mid-19th century America (and those of Britain, with even less justification).

Gatling was born in Murfreesboro, N.C., in 1818 and died in New York City in 1903. As a young man he became wealthy through patents for agricultural implements; in his lifetime he had 43 patents for items as varied as plows, bicycles, flush toilets and dry-cleaning apparatus. Indeed, it was through observing seeds drop through his mechanical seed planter that he got the idea for a gravity-fed gun.

The author makes a big deal of patents, and rightly so. She calls the patent system America's "soul" for its encouragement of invention, entrepreneurship and economic growth. Here, and in placing Gatling in the economic and social ethos of the times, her cultural history is apposite and well-told.

Gatling never stopped improving his gun, yet toward the end of his life he all but said he regretted having invented it. It cost him more than he ever made from it, he said, and it overshadowed his accomplishments in nonlethal machinery.

Roger K. Miller, a freelance writer, is the author of the novel "Invisible Hero."

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