Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It
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Soon after its debut at the time of the Civil War, the Gatling gun, invented by Richard Gatling, changed the nature of warfare and the course of world history. Discharging 200 shots per minute with alarming accuracy, the world's first machine gun became vitally important to protecting and expanding America's overseas interests. The Barnes & Noble Review "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine -- a gun -- which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would...supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished," wrote Richard Gatling in 1877, 15 years after patenting the first working machine gun. Gatling was often at pains to justify his creation, but as self-serving as his words sound today -- inventing a machine gun to save lives? -- he was likely sincere, observes Julia Keller in Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: after all, in the optimistic 19th century, the benefits of technology seemed limitless. Even so, resistance from military higher-ups delayed adoption of the gun, which Gatling, a self-taught engineer, had hoped would hasten a Union victory in the Civil War. Some simply refused to accept that machines could trump individual valor ("It does not seem like soldiers' work," complained an infantryman testing an early version). But attitudes shifted, and besides seeing action in the Spanish-American War, the mean-looking Gatlings were wheeled out to break labor strikes and clear the West of Native Americans before being rendered obsolete by deadlier descendants. Keller draws a line from the Gatling gun to the AK-47 and the atomic bomb, lending an uncomfortable prescience to Gatling's words. Bloody as it was, the 20th century, she writes near the end of this lively, fascinating book, proved that "the more deadly and effective the technology used in a war, the fewer the numbers of human beings required to fight it." --Barbara Spindel
Introduction 1Ch. 1 Cold Beauty 17Ch. 2 A World of Mornings 53Ch. 3 Land of the Second Chance 89Ch. 4 "Drunkards, Dandies & Loafers" 113Ch. 5 The Spaces Between the Bullets 141Ch. 6 "A Little Gatling Music" 173Ch. 7 "The World's Great Storm" 207Ch. 8 Warriors and Sages 225Acknowledgments 245Notes 247Bibliography 271Index 285
