Richard Jordan Gatling was an American inventor best known for his invention of the Gatling gun, a crank-operated, multibarrel machine gun, which he patented in 1862.
Background
Gatling was born in Hertford County, North Carolina in 1818. He was the son of a well-to-do planter and slave-owner, from whom he inherited a genius for mechanical invention and whom he assisted in the construction and perfecting of machines for sowing cotton seeds, and for thinning the plants.
Education
Motivated by his contracting smallpox on a river steamer where no medical aid was available, he studied medicine, receiving his doctor's degree from the Medical College of Ohio at Cincinnati in 1850. Although he had his MD, he never practiced; he was more interested in a career as an inventor.
Career
Gatling’s career as an inventor began when he assisted his father in the construction and perfecting of machines for sowing cotton seeds and for thinning cotton plants. In 1839 he perfected a practical screw propeller for steamboats, only to find that a patent had been granted to John Ericsson for a similar invention a few months earlier. He established himself in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1844, and, taking the cotton-sowing machine as a basis, he adapted it for sowing rice, wheat, and other grains. The introduction of these machines did much to revolutionize the agricultural system in the country.
Becoming interested in the study of medicine during an attack of smallpox, Gatling completed a course at the Ohio Medical College in 1850. In the same year, he invented a hemp-breaking machine, and in 1857 a steam plow. At the outbreak of the American Civil War he devoted himself at once to the perfecting of firearms. In 1861 he conceived the idea of the rapid-fire machine gun that is associated with his name. By 1862 he had succeeded in perfecting the weapon; but the war was practically over before the federal authorities consented to its official adoption.
Membership
Richard Jordan Gatling was elected as the first president of the American Association of Inventors and Manufacturers in 1891, serving for six years.
Connections
By the early 1850s, Gatling was successful enough in business to offer marriage to Jemima Sanders, 19 years younger than Gatling and the daughter of a prominent Indianapolis physician. They married on October 25, 1854.