Gatling

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of early rapid-fire firearm featuring multiple rotating barrels designed to deliver continuous gunfire for sustained periods
2. An automatic weapon that uses a mechanism of rotating barrels to increase rate of shooting and minimize overheating during repeated firing
3. A gun mechanism characterized by several barrels that rotate around a central axis to provide rapid, continuous discharge of projectiles without frequent reloading

Etymology: The Gatling gun was named for Richard Jordan Gatling, an American inventor who patented it in 1862. He was a physician and businessman, not a military engineer, and he designed the weapon after watching soldiers die of disease and wounds during the American Civil War. He reasoned that a machine firing many rounds could reduce the number of men needed on the front line, and in that sense he hoped it would make war less deadly. The "-ing" ending is not a suffix in the usual sense; it is simply his surname, which was used as a noun, much as "Colt" or "Maxim" came to name firearms. The gun worked by rotating a cluster of barrels around a central axis while a hand crank fed cartridges, so each barrel fired once per revolution. Gatling's design was adopted by the United States Army and later by many other nations, and the name became a generic term for any hand-cranked or electrically driven multi-barrel weapon. Some later variants, such as the Vulcan cannon, still follow the same basic principle.

Synonyms: machine gun, automatic gun