“Uncovering the Hidden Genius: The Surprising Origins of the World’s First Machine Gun!”
Automatic fire has long been a part of warfare, with volleys of arrows fired by masses of archers playing a key role in battles from antiquity to the late middle ages. Placing such firepower in the hands of a single soldier, however, was another matter entirely. In the late 15th Century, Italian renaissance man extraordinaire Leonardo da Vinci sketched a number of ingenious engines of war in his notebooks, including an arrow-firing “machine gun” comprising no fewer than sixteen crossbows mounted on a rotating wheel. One version of this device was driven by a man-powered treadmill, which automatically cocked the bowstrings as it rotated. Yet another sketch depicts a spring-powered catapult with multiple arms for throwing stones in rapid succession. In Leonardo’s day, cannons were just starting to appear on the battlefield, but they were slow and tedious to reload; so, naturally, Leonardo also designed artillery pieces featuring multiple barrels to increase their firepower. As with most of Leonardo’s inventions, however, there is no evidence that any of these weapons were ever actually built.
The weapon commonly cited as being the world’s first “true” machine gun is the Puckle Gun, patented in 1718 by London lawyer James Puckle. However, strictly speaking this is not quite accurate, since a machine gun is typically defined as a weapon which can fire multiple shots in quick succession by turning a crank or – by the modern definition – pulling the trigger. Rather, Puckle’s gun is more accurately described as a rapid-firing revolver cannon, more akin to a modern revolver. That said, it was amongst the first, if not the first gun, to ever be called a machine gun when, in a 1722 shipping manifest, it was noted that the ship had on board “2 Machine Guns of Puckles.”
