First Freedom Page 18
This is what Gatling saw in 1871, and this is what he wanted to stop with a high-powered rapid-fire gun. Often depicted as a tragic figure, Gatling attempted to belittle the importance of his invention, framing it as a means of diminishing mass death rather than creating it. “The best way to ameliorate war is to shorten it,” he would say.6 That it would not do—although it would make him rich and famous. Whether his dovish intentions were merely a retroactive justification after remorse struck the man is certainly up for debate. We can’t bore into Gatling’s soul to find out. Of course, as we’ll see, if Gatling hadn’t invented the rapid-fire gun, someone else would have.
What we do know is that Gatling, a completely self-taught mechanical engineer, almost solved the long-standing problem of automatic fire. Throughout history, engineers had attempted to rig guns that could fire multiple rounds without reloading. From the first days of gunpowder, soldiers rammed as many pellets and shards as they could into pot guns. Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for a thirty-three-barreled organ gun with three rows of eleven guns each, all connected to a single revolving platform. Attached to the sides of the platform were large wheels. Ribauldequins—guns that often featured ten or more iron barrels in a row—were first said to be used by King Edward III of England in 1339 against France, and would be used, in various forms, by numerous armies over the next centuries.
In the mid-1500s, Sir Francis Walsingham, then secretary of state, turned up at court with a mysterious German who, “among other excellent qualities,” had promised to produce a harquebus “that shall contain balls or pellets of lead, all of which shall go off one after another, having once given fire, so that with one harquebus one may kill ten thieves or other enemies without recharging it.”7 There is no record of what became of the experiment. In the early 1700s an Englishman named James Puckle patented a flintlock cylinder crank-propelled gun that could hold eleven shots. It probably never went past the prototype stage.
Even as Gatling was attempting to build his gun, a number of other inventors were already toying with the idea. In 1861, the Billinghurst company would test its Billinghurst-Requa battery gun in front of the New York Stock Exchange, hoping to lure investors.8 Invented by a dentist named Josephus Requa—who was apprentice to once-prominent upstate New York gunmaker William Billinghurst, thus the name—the gun fired off 175 shots per minute, reaching 225 shots in a minute and fifteen seconds in later trials. The gun featured twenty-five horizontal barrels mounted on a light artillery carriage that were loaded at the breeches with “piano hinge” magazines with .52-caliber cartridges. The gun used percussion caps on one nipple that detonated one round that passed in domino fashion from one cartridge to the next until it was exhausted. Although the gun had its champions, including members of the New York Light Artillery, it was barely used by the Union, as it often failed in damp weather and was difficult to reload and aim.
Around the same time Requa was impressing investors on Wall Street, an edition of Scientific American reported that an offer had come from an English firm to sell the Union Army an armament called the “Perkins steam gun” that could discharge ten twelve-pound balls per minute. Although the inventor, Jacob Perkins, had died more than a decade earlier, he was already well-known to many Americans. The Massachusetts-born Perkins, who had moved to England after his banknote engraving methods (soon to be widely adopted), had a difficult time finding traction with United States investors. Perkins was behind numerous well-received creations, including the first patented vapor-compression refrigeration cycle.9 The steam-powered gun generated some excitement among political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including Lincoln.
Military leaders, on the other hand, were less impressed. Steam, as it turned out, was a lot less robust as a propellant than gunpowder, making a “steam gun” a step backward. Or, as the Duke of Wellington is said to have quipped after seeing an exhibition of the weapon, “if steam guns had been invented first, what a capital improvement gunpowder would have been.”10
Inventors kept getting closer. The year Gatling witnessed the wounded hobbling back to Indianapolis, a man named Wilson Ager was already testing a hand-cranked machine gun in America. President Lincoln, after an exhibition of Alger’s so-called Coffee Mill Gun, wrote, “I saw this gun myself, and witnessed some experiments with it and I really think it worth the attention of the Government.”11 The idea was sound, the execution less so. Military leaders complained that the Coffee Mill Gun overheated and failed to feed ammunition and allowed gas to escape from the breech during firing, lowering the weapon’s velocity. By March 1863, Scientific American reported that Coffee Mill Guns had “proved of no practical value” and the remaining guns were put in storage in Washington. The Union had ordered a number of these unreliable contraptions, in turn souring Lincoln on Gatling’s similar invention, even though the president was typically a fan of firearm innovations.
“I assure you my invention is no ‘Coffee Mill Gun,’ ” Gatling wrote in an 1864 letter. “The object of this invention,” he went on, “is to obtain a simple, compact, durable, and efficient firearm for war purposes, to be used either in attack or defense, one that is light when compared to ordinary field artillery, that is easily transported, that may be rapidly fired, and that can be operated by few men.”12 But it was like a Coffee Mill Gun. While Gatling’s brainchild would evolve over the years, at this point the fundamental mechanism was similar. It was equipped with anywhere from four to ten barrels—most of the time six—organized around a central axis featuring a magazine that loaded each barrel separately. A person could theoretically fire the barrel as fast or as slow as the hand-crank allowed. In reality, since the metal barrel experienced a tremendous heat, each barrel had an opportunity to cool as it revolved.
When it worked, it was terrifying. In an era that was not fully removed from the use of flintlock muskets, this constituted a nearly incomprehensible speed of fire. Early models of the gun could shoot 200 rounds per minute. Later models fired up to 1,000 rounds per minute. In 1870 it was reported that Gatling personally fired 1,925 rounds in 2 minutes and 30 seconds.13 While the rapidity was certainly impressive, what also enticed those who tested the gun was its simplicity. “The mechanical construction is very simple, the workmanship is well executed, and we are of the opinion that it is not liable to get out of working order,” a Union officer reported after trials of the gun at Washington Navy Yard in 1863.14 Gatling, normally a reserved man, participated in a number of public demonstrations to impress crowds and grow more comfortable with salesmanship. “The newly invented gun of Richard J Gatling, of this city, was put through an experimental trial yesterday, with blank cartridges, at the State House square, in the presence of the Governor and a large crowd of citizens,” one Indiana newspaper reported.15 “It operates very successfully and will prove to be a weapon of war both novel and deadly.”
Some Army officers bypassed the Army ordnance bureaucracy and purchased Gatling guns for their troops. The flamboyant Union general Benjamin Butler, for instance, bought twelve of them in 1864. Gatling claimed that Butler “fired them himself upon the rebels. They created great consternation.”16 A lieutenant from the 4th New Jersey Battery wrote a friend that “Gen. Butler brought one his favorite Gatling guns, which throws 200 balls per minute, in this Battery on Friday, and pointing it through one of the embrasures, began to ‘turn the crank.’ This drew the fire of the Rebs on us, and one captain and a private were severely wounded.” In the same year, a Gatling demonstration so impressed future Democratic Party nominee for president Winfield Scott Hancock, he ordered a dozen for his corps. It was only at the end of the war that the Army officially adopted sixty Gatling guns for general use.17
Yet, overall, the Gatling gun saw scant action during the war—and when it did, it was near the end of the conflict. Despite all the potential and plaudits, it would take years for the gun to be ready to be adopted by the U.S. Army as a standard armament. The early models were heavy and cumbersome, mounted on old cannon
carriages that were difficult to move during battle. The early models did not provide lateral fire, which often made them nearly useless. After the war, the Army created a specialized wood carriage to lighten the burden and gave it a 12-degree sweep at 1,200 yards, but the life span of the gun would be short.
Gatling was more successful selling his guns abroad to the Russians, Austrians, and Turks. Other Europeans had already taken up similar lines of thinking during the mid-1800s. The Mitrailleuse gun—mitraille means grapeshot—was a multibarreled rifle gun that could fire up to 444 times per minute. Invented by Captain Fafschamps and Joseph Montigny in 1851, it went through numerous iterations. By 1867, Emperor Napoleon III of France was so impressed by a display of the weapon that he made a large purchase for his army. However, its performance in battle would be lacking, as it suffered from many of the tactical problems of the Gatling gun. It was heavy and difficult to move and offered little lateral fire. It was dropped within two years. Some historians argue that the Mitrailleuse’s poor showing in the Franco-Prussian War resulted in lagging interest in machine guns for many European armies. It cost them.
Many other inventors took their shot. There was the Nordenfelt gun, invented by a Swedish engineer named Helge Palmcrantz (it was financed by a banker named Thorsten Nordenfelt, thus the name), which was an updated version of the Mitrailleuse. Patented in 1873, it was also a multiple-barreled gun that was mounted laterally, and a wooden strip would feed the gun at a rate of 350 shots per minute by a hand-cranked mechanism that fed cartridges in through an overhead hopper. There was the Gardner gun, invented in 1874 by William Gardner of Toledo, Ohio, a former captain in the Union Army. The British Army took an interest after seeing the five-barreled gun fire 16,754 rounds before a failure occurred, with only 24 stoppages. When operator-induced errors were taken into account, there were only four malfunctions in 10,000 rounds fired. The Army adopted the weapon, although its introduction was delayed because of opposition from the Royal Artillery seeing some action. There were others: the Lowell Machine Gun and the Wilder Machine Gun, to name just two.
Each of them brought some specialized aspect to the table. In the end, none of them were successful, because a new gun—one that could sustain self-perpetuating fire—was about to change everything.
15
AN AMERICAN IN LONDON
“Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.”
—Hilaire Belloc
Sir Hiram Maxim
Many years after he was already wealthy and famous, Hiram Maxim, who suffered from bronchitis his whole life, invented the first steam inhaler to mitigate his suffering. One of his critics soon accused him of wasting his time and “prostituting” his talents on “quack” devices for the sick. “From the foregoing it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine,” Maxim sarcastically retorted, “and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”1
The fact was that the American would one day be knighted by Queen Victoria, and it wasn’t because he had helped people breathe easier. Maxim invented guns that did more than simply introduce automatic rapid fire to the battlefields of Europe. They decimated long-standing notions about courage and ingenuity and changed the contours of warfare forever. Men, no matter how brave or resourceful or talented with a gun, could now be mowed down by a contraption that took little skill or bravery to use.
In 1871, the New York Times published an editorial informing its readers of a new creation, one that it referred to as a “terrible automatic engine of war.” Rather than lament the power of Maxim’s new automatic weapons, the newspaper remarked that such an easy-to-use, perpetually killing machine would almost certainly impel world leaders to end their disputes through diplomacy rather than violent conflict.2 “Machine guns and automatic weapons are the highest types of firearms that have been invented,” the unnamed author of the editorial notes, “and indeed it seems impossible to imagine anything more likely than they to bring about a general state of peace among all nations.”
It would not. Although there is no way to properly quantify just how many people Maxim’s inventions would leave dead or mutilated on the muddy battlefields of Europe over the next fifty years, Edward C. Ezell, curator of armed forces history at the Smithsonian Institution, once speculated that the “numbers must be astronomical.”3 And whereas Gatling, like other gunmakers of the nineteenth century, claimed his invention was conceived for humanitarian reasons, Hiram Maxim offered no such moral justifications. In fact, years later he recalled that the reason he’d gotten into the gun trade in the first place was because an American expat had told him figuring out ways to allow European nations to kill each other was the fastest way to get rich. He was right.
Born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, Maxim described himself as a “chronic inventor.”4 He probably deserves to be considered one of the greatest this country has ever produced. By the age of fourteen he was apprenticing to a carriage maker, and by the age of twenty-six he obtained the first of his 271 patents in the United States. Maxim’s inventions were as imaginative as they were wide-ranging. His earliest biographer describes his impressive list of patents as “multifarious devices” that would lie on a spectrum of interests, including a modern mousetrap, an automatic sprinkling system, an automatic steam-powered water pump, gas motors, smokeless powders, flying machines, hair curling irons, gas generators, steam traps, meters, storage batteries, apparatuses for demagnetizing watches, regulators, electric lamp fixtures, magnetoelectric machines, a process for recovering solvents, a riveting machine, and magnetic separators.5 Maxim would later be fixated on flight, eventually concocting a 7,000-pound biplane in 1893 that was equipped with light steam engines and that successfully rose from the ground, though only a few feet.
Maxim should be properly considered one of the first electrical engineers in the United States. He was hired as chief engineer of the United States Electric Lighting Company, the main competitor of Edison, in 1878. The self-taught Maxim claimed to have beaten the famous inventor to the lightbulb, and he produced a lamp with a high-resistance filament. Edison’s fame would constantly intrude on Maxim’s own accomplishments and never stop annoying him. As Maxim once explained to his business partner, the next time any person confused his invention with Edison’s, he “would kill him on the spot.”
In 1881 his electric pressure regulator was exhibited at the Paris Exposition, where he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. And after a falling-out with a British lighting company, the supremely confident Maxim, who claimed never to have smoked, imbibed, or drunk caffeine (but had purportedly left children and marriages—sometimes more than one at the same time—strewn wherever he went), set up shop in London in 1881 to begin work on his machine gun. “Don’t do it,” a London competitor told Maxim after hearing about the inventor’s plans to make an automatic machine gun. “Thousands of men for many years have been working on guns; there are many hundreds of failures every year; many engineers and clever men imagine that they can make a gun, but they have never succeeded; they are all failures, so, you had better drop it and not spend a single penny on it. You don’t stand a ghost of a chance in competition with regular gunmakers. You are not a gun man. Stick to electricity.”6
Few engineers were more “clever” than Maxim, and he knew it. The self-perpetuated gun was certainly one that had been wrestled with for a long time. In 1663 a British inventor known only as “Palmer” presented a paper to the Royal Society that theorized that recoil and the gases produced by the exploding charge of a gun could reload automatically.7 The technology was not there—and it would not be there for another two hundred years.
It was Maxim’s Maine upbringing that ensured his creative mind was exposed to guns. Maxim points out in his autobiography that it was only around the time of his late childhood that fellow Mainers had stopped carrying their muskets to church every Sunday. By the mid-1800s, industrialization had made gun ownership far more affordable and
widespread, so they simply tucked their revolvers into their belts.
It was the rifle that captured the young man’s imagination. Maxim described being surprised by the “violence and the force” of the first Springfield rifles he fired in the 1870s. “Cannot this great force, at present merely an inconvenience, be harnessed to a useful purpose?” he asked himself. At that moment Maxim claims to have started exploring the idea of rigging a gun to reload using its own recoil energy. Maxim, in fact, claimed to have created rudimentary designs for such a gun as early as 1873, although it was ten years before it was built.8 In another instance Maxim would take credit for having conceived of the idea of a hand-cranked gun in 1854 when still a young teen. Whatever the case, until 1883, he noted, “no one had ever, to my knowledge, spent a single penny or made a single experiment in the attempt to evolve an automatic gun.”
Maxim’s first attempt to develop an automatic weapon was one that could be fired from the shoulder. By 1884 his experiments had progressed to a point where he could build his first working model.