Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Bolette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor at how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me, as he always does, senior writer
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. Do you see this? This is my boom stick?
Speaker 1: All right. That leads us to a little listener mail.
Speaker 1: This listener mail comes from Damon, and Damon says, could
Speaker 1: you please do a podcast on how the Gatling gun works?
Speaker 1: Because I saw it on MythBusters and I was wondering
Speaker 1: how it works. Well, Damon, we're gonna talk a bit
Speaker 1: about the Gatling gun today. It's an interesting piece of technology.
Speaker 1: But to really understand how the Gatling gun works, we
Speaker 1: need to go back further and talk about just the
Speaker 1: principles of firearms and how they work in general. Here
Speaker 1: we actually have already touched on a very very early firearm, uh,
Speaker 1: the arc Bus. Yeah. We talked in our our tech
Speaker 1: of fifteen hundred. We we kind of went into this.
Speaker 1: It was technically, you're right, the tech of fifteen ten
Speaker 1: and uh So going back to around the mid of
Speaker 1: the fourteenth century, that's when we first started seeing uh
Speaker 1: not we personally, I wasn't around back then, don't know
Speaker 1: about you. Put but the that's when cannons first started
Speaker 1: to hit the scene in medieval Europe. Yes, but they
Speaker 1: were they were very inaccurated, so they missed the scene
Speaker 1: part of the time. I couldn't have the broadside of
Speaker 1: a barn. But yeah, the the cannon was the probably
Speaker 1: the earliest form of gun. Um. I would imagine it
Speaker 1: probably was simply because they wanted something that would created, uh,
Speaker 1: something that would fire a big projectile and a gun
Speaker 1: that that actually is a good point and a gun
Speaker 1: in this definition is basically a tube sealed off at
Speaker 1: one end um that that can fire or some sort
Speaker 1: of projectile. Yeah, and it has at least the early cannon.
Speaker 1: The way they worked as they had a whole drilled
Speaker 1: toward the sealed end where you could place a lit
Speaker 1: fuse to light the gunpowder. So you would the way
Speaker 1: you would load a cannon as you would pack the
Speaker 1: gunpowder into the end of the cannon. Then you would
Speaker 1: load the shot into the cannon, sometimes with a either
Speaker 1: uh either with some sort of cloth wrapped around the shot,
Speaker 1: or you'd actually stuff watting down there to to seal it.
Speaker 1: Really well, you put the shot in, you put a
Speaker 1: lit fuse into the hole that lights the gunpowder. The
Speaker 1: gunpowder ignites, and essentially it explodes. It burns so quickly
Speaker 1: that that it we have to call it an explosion.
Speaker 1: The the gases that are given off when the gunpowder
Speaker 1: explodes propel the shot out of the cannon. That's where
Speaker 1: you get the the force you need to blow something up.
Speaker 1: And the the arquebus uh and other similar weapons like that,
Speaker 1: other cannon like that. Um, those were known as as
Speaker 1: the at least the ones that Jonathan is describing here
Speaker 1: are known as matchlock. The lock is the mechanism that
Speaker 1: is used to ignite the powder in this case. So, um,
Speaker 1: it's basically a very tiny hole and people would stick
Speaker 1: a um uh, some kind of fuse. It's really often
Speaker 1: a piece of string would burn down into I mean,
Speaker 1: you could also stick a match down in there, but
Speaker 1: you know, it's very very difficulty that there were a
Speaker 1: lot of problems with it because it's not something you
Speaker 1: can do in the in the rain. Yeah, yeah, there
Speaker 1: are actually a lot of problems. So so let's talk
Speaker 1: about some of the early guns. The early guns were
Speaker 1: essentially like handguns. The earliest guns were really nothing more
Speaker 1: than that tube that you would hold, and it usually
Speaker 1: took two people to fire one of these. One person
Speaker 1: would hold and aim the gun, the other person would
Speaker 1: stick the lit match or lit fuse into the hole
Speaker 1: to light the gunpowder, and then you would fire it off.
Speaker 1: Eventually you got to the point of having handguns. And
Speaker 1: again it was still really hard to both aim and
Speaker 1: fire this thing at the same time because you know,
Speaker 1: holding a lit match and then getting your target in
Speaker 1: view and then putting the lit match to the whole
Speaker 1: that's pretty tough. So the matchlock was a huge benefit, right,
Speaker 1: There was a big leap forward. Yeah, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: I mean the bigger leap forward being the flintlock. Right.
Speaker 1: So the matchlock, what it would do is you would
Speaker 1: have usually a little a little pan that would hold
Speaker 1: some gunpowder and you would pull a trigger the the
Speaker 1: lit fuse would be on the end of a lever.
Speaker 1: Pulling the trigger would lower the lever to the pan.
Speaker 1: It would light that gunpowder, which would go into the
Speaker 1: breach of the of the gun, lighting the main charge. Right, okay,
Speaker 1: But as Poulette was saying, if it's raining well and
Speaker 1: you've got powder exposed in that little pan, you may
Speaker 1: not have your on fire at all. And also you
Speaker 1: had to continuously make sure that your your match was
Speaker 1: stayed lit. And at night you would have problems because
Speaker 1: you would be visible because you had this little bit match.
Speaker 1: The flintlock was a big advantage over the matchlock. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I can imagine now people going, huh, it's an awful
Speaker 1: lot of fireflies out there tonight, right, might might want
Speaker 1: to aim at those big guys. Ye. So, so the
Speaker 1: flintlock had a hammer which was the the the section
Speaker 1: of the gun that would hold the flint. You'd have
Speaker 1: a piece of flint that would be wedged in on
Speaker 1: the hammer um and the hammer was activated by a
Speaker 1: tumbler that was connected to a spring. When you cocked
Speaker 1: the hammer back, uh you could. They had three three
Speaker 1: different positions uncocked, half cocked, and fully cocked. So when
Speaker 1: you say go off half cocked, that's that's where this
Speaker 1: comes from, which is kind of ironic because you would
Speaker 1: want it half cocked to load it, and that was
Speaker 1: the one place well between half and fully when it's
Speaker 1: half cocked, it can't actually fire. It's right. You would
Speaker 1: pull the trigger and there's a little lever that would
Speaker 1: that was up against the tumbler. Right, So the tumbler
Speaker 1: has notches in it, and the half cocked notch. This
Speaker 1: notch is so large that when you pull the trigger,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't clear the tumbler, so it would not it
Speaker 1: would not make the hammer. Uh, they would not release
Speaker 1: the hammer, So there was no way you could accidentally. Theoretically,
Speaker 1: if the gun was in good shape, there's no way
Speaker 1: you could accidentally fire it prematurely. Now, when it was
Speaker 1: fully cocked, then it would be in a slightly shallower notch.
Speaker 1: You pull the trigger, it releases the tumbler, which is
Speaker 1: under tension from a spring. The hammer flies forward and
Speaker 1: the flint strikes a steel plate and that creates sparks
Speaker 1: which then light the gunpowder inside again a little gunpowder
Speaker 1: pan which usually had a cover over it, So you
Speaker 1: could theoretically fire a flintlock in the rain and still
Speaker 1: have a good chance of it going off, and again
Speaker 1: gunpowder lit in the pan would go into the breach
Speaker 1: of the gun, firing off the main charge. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: little piece of metal is known as the frizzen. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: and the frizen spring is what makes the flint lock
Speaker 1: weather proof because um, it's what's got the cover that's
Speaker 1: attached to the frozen over the pan. So it's it's
Speaker 1: basically due to the design. It's covering the pan where
Speaker 1: the powder is right exactly. That helps. That helps right there.
Speaker 1: So what happens is when the flint hits the frizzen.
Speaker 1: This sounds really weird, right, when the flint hits the frizzen,
Speaker 1: it actually lifts the pan, the lid of the pan up.
Speaker 1: The force of the blow lifts the lid of the
Speaker 1: pan up, the sparks hit the gunpowder and the gun fires.
Speaker 1: And then as soon as the gun has is uncocked
Speaker 1: the pan after after the initial impact, because the spring
Speaker 1: of the that's attached to the frizen is under tension,
Speaker 1: it will pull the lid back down. So again you
Speaker 1: would have to half cock the flint lock in order
Speaker 1: to load it again. You would actually load it by
Speaker 1: putting gunpowder directly into the breach of the gun, but
Speaker 1: you would have to put a little bit of gunpowder
Speaker 1: in the the frizzen pan for it to work. Otherwise
Speaker 1: you just you know, the sparks would not make it
Speaker 1: to the main charge. So this sets the stage for
Speaker 1: the next huge leap forward in firearm technology, which was
Speaker 1: the percussion cap. Yes, the percussion cap was a tiny
Speaker 1: little device that was actually it was essentially a chemical compound,
Speaker 1: uh And it was mercury fulminate combination mercury, nitric acid,
Speaker 1: and alcohol. And it is very shock sensitive, which means
Speaker 1: if you hit it, it blows up there. So you
Speaker 1: what the earliest percussive cap, percussion cap guns had a
Speaker 1: little uh, well they called it a nipple. It's a
Speaker 1: little protrusion that you would put the cap on and
Speaker 1: you would cock the gun back, just like a flint lock.
Speaker 1: And the it had a hammer that when you pull
Speaker 1: the trigger, the hammer would come down hit the percussion cap,
Speaker 1: which would cause the initial explosion that again lit the
Speaker 1: charge inside the gun. Right, what really really brought warfare
Speaker 1: to a new level was when we figured out how
Speaker 1: to put the percussion cap, the charge, and the bullet
Speaker 1: all together in a single cartridge. Yes, and initially I
Speaker 1: believe people were experimenting with paper cartridges, but they weren't
Speaker 1: as as refined as when they developed the metal cartridge,
Speaker 1: which is what we are still using now. You see that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, if you look at what most people think
Speaker 1: of as a bullet, I would say the majority of
Speaker 1: what most people see is the brass cartridge, which is
Speaker 1: the bottom part of the bullet. It's the part where
Speaker 1: the uh, the firing pin strikes and uh launches the
Speaker 1: projectile from the gun. Yeah. Yeah, that's the Whenever I
Speaker 1: think of bullet, I'm thinking of the full cartridge. I'm
Speaker 1: not thinking of the tip. Now, hunters and soldiers, of
Speaker 1: course they're going to they have a much better knowledge
Speaker 1: of the source of stuff. But I think for the layman,
Speaker 1: when we say bullet, you're thinking of the thing you
Speaker 1: put in the gun, which technically is a cartridge. Um,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it has three sections. There's the primer, which
Speaker 1: is the percussion cap. There's the propellant, which is the
Speaker 1: gunpowder or other propellant. And then you have the bullet,
Speaker 1: which is the tip that that actually fires out of
Speaker 1: the gun and hits your target or whatever whatever the
Speaker 1: gun happens. We pointed at. Actually, so in this case,
Speaker 1: the big change here was that guns now had a
Speaker 1: firing pen that would strike the percussion cap, so that
Speaker 1: that's what would ignite the propellant and push the bullet
Speaker 1: out of the gun, which meant that you had a
Speaker 1: spent cartridge in your gun afterward. So, um, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: it looks like you're just about to say something, so
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have shut up. Well, there there's something that
Speaker 1: we also need to address to, which is the barrel,
Speaker 1: yes of the gun. Now, I mean, up until this
Speaker 1: point to roughly, I'm not being exact here, we've been
Speaker 1: sort of talking about, for the most part, muzzle loading
Speaker 1: weapons where you actually put the bullet. Uh and in
Speaker 1: this case, in the earlier weapons, we were speaking of
Speaker 1: a lead ball in your bullet, so or you know,
Speaker 1: a shot in a cannon or a different you know,
Speaker 1: grape shot or whatever it is that you're firing out it.
Speaker 1: So let's say projectile. So you're pushing the projectile down
Speaker 1: the tube and you know, loading it yourself by hand
Speaker 1: up until we got to the cartridge point. But um,
Speaker 1: the thing is in order to make that, well, not
Speaker 1: in order to make that For the most part, when
Speaker 1: they started out, there were smooth what they call smooth bore,
Speaker 1: which means it was you know, the insides of it
Speaker 1: were smooth, they were polished, and it was easy to
Speaker 1: push a bullet down there. Well, they also figured out, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, probably around um I believe that the fifteenth
Speaker 1: century or so, that that's not really the most accurate
Speaker 1: way to get a projectile to its target. By rifling
Speaker 1: the tube the barrel of the gun, you could do
Speaker 1: a lot more. You can actually uh add some uh
Speaker 1: some distance, and you can improve accuracy as well. And
Speaker 1: initially those those weapons were had barrels that were straight,
Speaker 1: had straight grooves in them, but eventually discovered that a
Speaker 1: spiral groove would give would improve accuracy and range, makes
Speaker 1: it makes the shot spin right. But it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to muzzle load when you have a spiral groove, right,
Speaker 1: because it's like little ridges, right, Yes, So it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like pushing something past a series of ridges. It's
Speaker 1: not it's not going to load as quickly or smoothly
Speaker 1: as a smooth bore rifle or smooth bore barrel. So
Speaker 1: breech loading sort of takes the uh, that problem out
Speaker 1: of the way because at that point, when you have
Speaker 1: a breech loading weapon, then you are you don't have
Speaker 1: to push the projectile all the way down the muzzle
Speaker 1: and get what's what's in the barrel out right. With
Speaker 1: breech loading, you're putting the shot in toward towards your end,
Speaker 1: the end that doesn't have the deadly part pointed at you.
Speaker 1: Uh see, I'm not worried about I'm not worried about
Speaker 1: looking like an idiot, because I am one. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I know many of the parts of the gun, but
Speaker 1: I really honestly don't know what you would call I
Speaker 1: mean talking about the stock and the and the um.
Speaker 1: But yes, if you've ever fired a breech loading rifle before,
Speaker 1: you know that there's a handle down there that you
Speaker 1: used to lift the breech bolt out, you know, and
Speaker 1: and pull the cartridge out. You could put a new
Speaker 1: cartridge in, lock it into place, and then fire the
Speaker 1: weapon right it loads the bullet or the cartridge we
Speaker 1: should say, exactly where it needs to be. That's a
Speaker 1: big that's a good point because that that was one
Speaker 1: of the things that that gunmakers had to to figure
Speaker 1: out in order to make to make cartridge firing weapons useful.
Speaker 1: I mean, you had to have the percussive percussion cap
Speaker 1: positioned at the right spot so that the firing pin
Speaker 1: would hit it at the right point to to make
Speaker 1: anything happen. Right, So we're at this point, we're right
Speaker 1: around the eighteen seventies. Okay, So so the flint was
Speaker 1: that was way back in the fifteen hundreds, and percussion
Speaker 1: caps started coming out in the early eighteen hundreds, and
Speaker 1: then by the seventies that's when we're starting to move
Speaker 1: to cartridges. There were some cartridge firing weapons during the
Speaker 1: Civil War, but eighteen seventies was when they were really
Speaker 1: starting to get perfected. Yeah, we're to the point where
Speaker 1: we have very efficient weapons, but they fire basically one
Speaker 1: shot at a time. You have to load the load
Speaker 1: the gun, fire the gun, pulled the spent cartridge out,
Speaker 1: and then put a new cartridge and and fire the
Speaker 1: gun again. There were a couple of exceptions that were
Speaker 1: revolvers which could fire between well, depending on the revolver.
Speaker 1: The one we're mostly familiar with is the six shot
Speaker 1: revolver six six Yeah, the Old West, So it's these
Speaker 1: were the ones that had these six cylinders that would
Speaker 1: rotate as you were firing the gun, so that would
Speaker 1: put a new cartridge in firing position every time you
Speaker 1: pulled the trigger. The way that worked, and it's important
Speaker 1: to understand this because it kind of plays in with
Speaker 1: the gatling gun that we're gonna get to in just
Speaker 1: a second. The way that worked is that when you
Speaker 1: pulled the trigger, the trigger actually had a pall attached
Speaker 1: to a p a w L. It's a component of
Speaker 1: a ratchet. And what that did was it pushed against
Speaker 1: the revolvers cylinders so that it would turn it one
Speaker 1: sixth of a turn or however many to move the
Speaker 1: cylinder in the right position. It would also, at the
Speaker 1: same time cock the trigger back. And if you when
Speaker 1: you pulled it all the way to the end, if
Speaker 1: it's a if it's an automatic revolver, then the trigger
Speaker 1: the the the hammer comes forward, hits the firing pen,
Speaker 1: moves into position, hits the percussion cap, and the bullet
Speaker 1: fires out of the gun. You still have a spent
Speaker 1: cartridge inside the cylinder, but a new cylinder will move
Speaker 1: into place as soon as you start pulling the trigger again.
Speaker 1: Some of the early revolvers you actually had to pull
Speaker 1: the hammer back yourself. You couldn't just pull the trigger
Speaker 1: and have the hammer come back. You'd have to cock
Speaker 1: it yourself. And that's what would ratchet the cylinder into position.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't long before they figured out ways to
Speaker 1: to make that more closer to an automatic process. Um.
Speaker 1: So if you have a you would have to remove
Speaker 1: the spent cartridges out once you've finished firing, put new
Speaker 1: new cartridges in. So there was no way to make
Speaker 1: that a continuous firing method. So it still was it
Speaker 1: was an improvement over the old fire once, reload once method,
Speaker 1: but it was still not the weapon of destruction that
Speaker 1: the Gatlink gun turned into. Yeah. Yeah, Now, before we
Speaker 1: get to the gat Link gun, which was you know,
Speaker 1: basically essentially an early machine gun of sorts. Um, there
Speaker 1: were other attempts over the years, for many many years.
Speaker 1: In fact, I know you wanted to speak of one
Speaker 1: very famous inventor who tried to come up with a
Speaker 1: way to fire multiple projectiles at once. Yeah. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is not the idea of having multiple projectiles or
Speaker 1: you know, rapid fire projectiles coming from cannon or or
Speaker 1: from uh smaller guns. You know, this isn't this isn't
Speaker 1: new to Mr Gatling. No. No, actually, if you want
Speaker 1: to really look at some some cool designs, a certain
Speaker 1: Mr Leonardo da Vinci came up with a pretty clever one. Uh,
Speaker 1: as far as I know, he never made one of
Speaker 1: these things, But was a design he created which was
Speaker 1: a triangular mount that held eleven cannon to a side. Okay,
Speaker 1: so each side of the triangle had eleven cannon mounted
Speaker 1: to it, and the idea was that you would load
Speaker 1: all thirty three cannon and have them ready to go,
Speaker 1: and then you would aim it at your enemy. Fire
Speaker 1: the top eleven. So so the inverted pyramid right, Yes,
Speaker 1: the point of the triangle is facing downwards. You fire
Speaker 1: the the eleven on top, rotate, do a third of
Speaker 1: a rotation, and then fire the next eleven, and then
Speaker 1: to a third of the rotate. Shouldn't fire the final eleven. Uh.
Speaker 1: You could not, of course load the cannon as you
Speaker 1: were firing them, because you would very rapidly run out
Speaker 1: of men to load the cannon as they were burnt
Speaker 1: and blown up. But but the idea was that it
Speaker 1: would be such a terrible weapon that no enemy would
Speaker 1: dare attack you. So it was that whole concept of
Speaker 1: I've got to stick big enough that no one's going
Speaker 1: to bother me. It wasn't really necessarily meant as a
Speaker 1: as an actual weapon of war. But you have. One
Speaker 1: of the biggest problems of any kind of weapon that
Speaker 1: would fire several times in a short in a short
Speaker 1: period is that the barrel gets really hot. And so
Speaker 1: the early experiments with machine gun type of weapons meant
Speaker 1: resulting in a lot of barrels overheating, breaking, sometimes exploding
Speaker 1: because the metal was too weak to contain the explosion
Speaker 1: of the gunpowder inside it. And so they had to
Speaker 1: find a way. Someone had to find the way of
Speaker 1: creating a gun that would be able to fire rapidly
Speaker 1: without overheating the barrel. And a couple of different people
Speaker 1: came up with different ideas of guns with multiple barrels. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: actually I was going to mention a different person short,
Speaker 1: Uh it was a little different if and I had
Speaker 1: never heard of this person before. His name was James Puckle.
Speaker 1: Did you run across this I didn't. This fellow, he
Speaker 1: was a British fellow. And uh came up with a
Speaker 1: flintlock weapon in around seventeen eighteen that does resemble the
Speaker 1: Gatling gun sort of, but it actually looks more alike
Speaker 1: a a revolver rifle and had you know, and and
Speaker 1: it was an attempt to do that, but unfortunately, being
Speaker 1: a flintlock weapon, it was it just really was not
Speaker 1: very practical. Um, But there was an attempt to do that,
Speaker 1: you know once once the percussion caps. And I realized
Speaker 1: too that we left out another invention that was necessity
Speaker 1: for making this happen. What's smokeless powder. We talk about that,
Speaker 1: that's true, but it was an important development in making
Speaker 1: cartridges because with the earlier versions of gunpowder, uh, it
Speaker 1: burned irregularly from what I understand, and one smokeless powder
Speaker 1: was invented, the combustion of the gunpowder was a lot
Speaker 1: more even and when made cartridge weapons a lot more practical.
Speaker 1: Not to mention the fact that if you had any
Speaker 1: sort of weapon that could fire multiple times in in
Speaker 1: you know, in a few minutes, uh, you had the
Speaker 1: very real problem of if you don't have smokeless gunpowder,
Speaker 1: you can't see what you're shooting at. There's that, yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you ever see a re enactment where people
Speaker 1: are using muzzle loaded weapons, you'll notice there's an awful
Speaker 1: lot of smoke that comes out of this. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: well they they do that, I think, especially for the
Speaker 1: re enactment value of that so that you can get
Speaker 1: an idea of what it was like at the time.
Speaker 1: But however, it is awfully cloudy. Are we now ready
Speaker 1: to speak of Mr Getling? Sure? So, Richard Jordan's Gatling
Speaker 1: He comes up with this invention in eighteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: so this is during the Civil War. He actually, uh
Speaker 1: he pitched this idea to President Lincoln saying that it
Speaker 1: was again a weapon that would help crush the rebellion. Um.
Speaker 1: So with this weapon, never mind, I was gonna make
Speaker 1: a Star Wars reference. We're just gonna move on. So anyway,
Speaker 1: that the Gatling gun, the original Gatlan gun had six barrels,
Speaker 1: but Gatling guns came in varieties of six to ten barrels,
Speaker 1: depending upon when, when, which model you're talking about. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Britannica told me, uh what, it didn't tell me anything, right, Um.
Speaker 1: From the article in Britannica, it suggested that there were
Speaker 1: ten initially and used paper cartridges initially and in the
Speaker 1: early experiments that he was doing with it. Right yeah.
Speaker 1: We should also point out that that thes these guns
Speaker 1: weren't really used in the Civil War very much other
Speaker 1: than in a couple of demonstrations. Uh. They they weren't
Speaker 1: widely distributed, so the gattling gun really had its first
Speaker 1: major use worldwide anyway, in World War One. But the
Speaker 1: the you also occasionally see him in Great Westerns. But
Speaker 1: the the idea here is that you have six to
Speaker 1: ten barrels on this on this rotating shaft, all right,
Speaker 1: so each barrel has its own spring loaded firing pin,
Speaker 1: so there's not one firing pin at the at the
Speaker 1: firing position. There are six to ten. However, many barrels
Speaker 1: there are, right, but you do have to have something
Speaker 1: to strike that firing pin. Yeah, well, kind of the
Speaker 1: way the well has. The gatling gun has a groove
Speaker 1: in it, a groove cut in it, so that when
Speaker 1: you are turning the crank, it is a crank turned
Speaker 1: gun as well. Yes, it's the original one was hand turned, yes,
Speaker 1: so it was not an automatic weapon. You would actually
Speaker 1: turn a crank kind of like if you've ever seen
Speaker 1: images of the old movie cameras that were hand cranked,
Speaker 1: same sort of principle. Here, you're and cranking this gun
Speaker 1: which is rotating the barrels. As the barrels rotate, the
Speaker 1: firing pins inside the barrels are actually being compressed because
Speaker 1: there's a groove that's cut into the the gun itself.
Speaker 1: The as you turn it, the firing pin gets pushed
Speaker 1: so that the spring inside the firing pin is under attension.
Speaker 1: It reaches a point where there's a release, the firing
Speaker 1: pin fires forward, hits the cartridge, and a gun, A
Speaker 1: bullet flies out of the barrel. Okay, yeah, I hadn't
Speaker 1: seen it exactly that way, but yeah, yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 1: I had to. I had to watch several videos to
Speaker 1: really get a good grip on it. And it's it's
Speaker 1: actually pretty cool that the way that you would load
Speaker 1: the gatling gun as you would use a hopper, and
Speaker 1: a hopper is a container that just holds cartridges and
Speaker 1: it's gravity fed. So on one side of the gatling gun,
Speaker 1: let's say, let's for the argument's sake, we'll say that
Speaker 1: you're in the firing position, so you're behind the gatland gun,
Speaker 1: and let's say, for argument's sake, the hoppers on the
Speaker 1: left side right. So what would happen is when you
Speaker 1: turn the crank. From your perspective, the gun turns in
Speaker 1: a clockwise position, so at around i'd say that the
Speaker 1: nine o'clock position, uh, or maybe even ten o'clock. I
Speaker 1: guess ten o'clock position. A cartridge feeds into the barrel.
Speaker 1: You turn the crank, and as you're turning the crank,
Speaker 1: that firing pin is moving further back until it reaches
Speaker 1: twelve o'clock and then it fires. Right, you fire the
Speaker 1: bullet forward. You keep turning the crank as the barrels
Speaker 1: move over to say the well, but at least by
Speaker 1: the six o'clock position, the empty cartridge falls out of
Speaker 1: the breach, right, so you don't have to take the
Speaker 1: empty cartridges out. It does it? It just the gravity.
Speaker 1: It will do that for you. Gravity loads it and
Speaker 1: gravity unloads it. Yes, and then you just turn that crank.
Speaker 1: And really the earliest one I think fired around two
Speaker 1: hundred rounds per minute, and then they later got up
Speaker 1: to around three six per minute. Yeah, I did read
Speaker 1: in uh also again in Britannica that you know, more
Speaker 1: modern versions of the weapon can fire as many as
Speaker 1: three thousand rounds per minute, right, But that's using a
Speaker 1: mechanical system. Trying to do it, Yeah, trying to do
Speaker 1: it by hand. You're not going to get that. You know,
Speaker 1: if you get that fast, then you're probably working on
Speaker 1: the justice League of America, except you wouldn't need a gun.
Speaker 1: Well you know, yeah, don't. Hey, you know, I'm just
Speaker 1: coming up with ideas here, So I'm sorry you were
Speaker 1: about to say something. No, no, no, I was going
Speaker 1: to say that that really the next cool uh development
Speaker 1: and guns, And I'm not going to go much further
Speaker 1: pass this because there's really no point. Would be the
Speaker 1: maximum gun by Hiram Maximum, right, he was the one
Speaker 1: who invented the first automatic machine gun which could fire
Speaker 1: five hundred rounds per minute, and I was around, and
Speaker 1: his big development was that he thought, hey, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of energy that gets released when you fire a
Speaker 1: bullet from a cartridge. There's the energy that pushes the
Speaker 1: bullet out of the barrel of the gun, and and
Speaker 1: that's a lot. What if we were to harness that
Speaker 1: energy in such a way that it would cock the
Speaker 1: gun for you so that would be ready to fire again.
Speaker 1: And that was the basis that that set the stage
Speaker 1: for the automatic machine gun. And there's several different ways
Speaker 1: to achieve this effect, but that's that's the basis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, that that you know, that's
Speaker 1: basically a gas operated weapon because the gas basically there's
Speaker 1: another tube an outlet that helps achieve that effect, and
Speaker 1: the majority of machine guns today use that. There's also
Speaker 1: the blowback and recoil methods. Uh. In the recoil method,
Speaker 1: both the bolt and the barrel travel together, which is
Speaker 1: hard for me to imagine. I need to I really
Speaker 1: need to see that because I know the barrel can
Speaker 1: travel within the gun, which is it's really confusing to me.
Speaker 1: When the weapon fires, the bolt goes with the barrel
Speaker 1: and they recoil together, but the barrel keeps snaps back
Speaker 1: and the bolt stays put, so it automatically pushes it
Speaker 1: with it from what I understand. And then blowback is
Speaker 1: basically the force of the explosion of the gunpowder UM
Speaker 1: pushing the bolt back for you, UM, and that forces
Speaker 1: the spring to compress and it's basically ready to fire again.
Speaker 1: But it's not as efficient as the gas operated Yeah,
Speaker 1: the gas operated one actually is a piston. There's a
Speaker 1: there's an additional piston. If you think about the barrel
Speaker 1: of the gun, like if you were to look at
Speaker 1: a cross section of a machine gun, you would have
Speaker 1: the barrel of the gun is one big tube. You
Speaker 1: would have a parallel tube that was slightly smaller that
Speaker 1: has a piston in it, and at the very end
Speaker 1: of or near the end of that tube, it would
Speaker 1: be an opening into the barrel. The gases from the
Speaker 1: escaping uh gunpowder, the escaping explosion would push the piston back,
Speaker 1: which cocks the gun. And this happens incredibly fast. I
Speaker 1: mean we were talking just a second five rounds per
Speaker 1: minute being the early one. And yeah, all it takes
Speaker 1: is just that piston moving back and uh and cocking
Speaker 1: the gun. Again. It's rate of fire. And you had
Speaker 1: multiple ways of of loading these guns. There were the
Speaker 1: hopper systems and the gravity based systems where the cartridges
Speaker 1: would essentially fall into place, and then later you had
Speaker 1: things like belt feeding systems and just slips, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is how many the weapons are loaded now. So it's
Speaker 1: they really these developments really made the Gatling gun obsolete. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean once you get to something like the Tommy gun,
Speaker 1: where you can carry around what is effectively the same
Speaker 1: as the Gatling gun, it's pretty yeah, game over. And
Speaker 1: even with the Gatling gun like that helped avoid some
Speaker 1: of the problems of the earlier machine guns, the ones
Speaker 1: about the barrels overheating and becoming too weak. But even
Speaker 1: with the gatling gun, you had different ways of cooling
Speaker 1: the barrels down so that they didn't get too hot
Speaker 1: too quickly, because if you did fire that into a
Speaker 1: sustained fire for too long, it could weaken the metal
Speaker 1: enough so that there could be an explosion and your
Speaker 1: gun could totally fail and uh and possibly injured or
Speaker 1: kill the operators. So yeah, I hope that that answers
Speaker 1: your question. Damon. The gatling gun is pretty, uh, a
Speaker 1: pretty interesting device, and we actually have an article on
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com about how machine guns work.
Speaker 1: There's an entire section dedicated just to the gatling gun,
Speaker 1: including an animation that kind of shows this firing pin mechanism.
Speaker 1: So if you thought that was a little confusing, I
Speaker 1: recommend you go and you look at that article because
Speaker 1: it is very helpful. Yeah, it is nice to see
Speaker 1: it in action if you're really trying to get an
Speaker 1: idea of of what we're talking about it as far
Speaker 1: as the mechanism goes and how it works. Right, So
Speaker 1: keep those questions coming in, guys, and uh, We're finding
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