Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun that Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It (review)

This is an exuberantly written book. Journalist and cultural critic Julia Keller brings Richard Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, to life and makes clear how he, like other inventors/designers of weapons and agents of mass destruction (including Leonardo da Vinci and Alfred Nobel), convinced themselves that their weapons and discoveries would reduce the likelihood of warfare between armies. As the Hartford Daily Times editorialized in 1852: “Men of science can do no greater service to humanity than by adding to the efficiency of warlike implements, so that the people and nations may find stronger inducements than naked moral suasion to lead them towards peace” (p. 28). How could this “quiet, gentle, buttoned-down business leader, a family man” (p. 28) have invented a rapid-fire weapon that became the precursor to the machine gun—a weapon that British prime minister David Lloyd George claimed caused more than 80 percent of battlefield deaths in World War I? That is the question Keller sets out to answer.

Gatling was born on a North Carolina plantation in 1818 and came of age when, to Americans, progress was inseparable from invention. Following in the steps of Eli Whitney, Gatling developed a device to improve the efficiency of agriculture, in Gatling’s case, rice planting. In his mid-twenties, he moved first to Saint Louis, where he turned his talents to developing seed drills, then to Cincinnati where he studied medicine and continued to apply his mechanical genius to devising implements that would improve agricultural efficiency through the application of steam. As the number of patents increased (he would receive forty-three before his death in 1903), so did his wealth. By the time the Civil War began, he had married into a family with Indiana political connections and owned multiple factories across the Midwest.

As the war continued, there is no doubt that Gatling thought about profits. But according to Keller, he also recoiled from the sight of maimed soldiers returning from the battlefield. Lessening casualties by developing a fearsome (and profitable) weapon that would make the human cost of battle unthinkably high seized Gatling’s imagination and he went to work applying the “rotating simplicity” and “smooth mechanical perfection” of his seed planter to a rapid-fire weapon that was ready for demonstration by 1862. The Union’s Ordnance Department, however, was not prepared to give much credence to the weapon and Gatling’s sales during the war were restricted to a handful of private purchases by General Benjamin Butler and Admiral David Porter. After the war, the Gatling gun, through artful promotion, gained most of its popularity and notoriety. The U.S. Army used it in warfare directed against American Indians in the upper Plains and against Hawaiians who opposed the U.S. occupation of their islands. The British bought the gun to use against insurgents in its empire, and the weapon was used to intimidate workers during the Homestead Strike.

Keller urges us to think about the Gatling gun in complex ways. “The Gatling gun,” she writes,“is a weapon of death, but its story is not altogether grim” (p. 11). She rightly locates Gatling in the history of inventions and patents (her description of the importance of patents is one of the best parts of this book). And she asks important questions about the rise of mass culture in tandem with weapons of mass destruction. She is surely right to suggest that the gun is a “cultural symbol” and to insist on Gatling’s place in the pantheon of American inventors. But Gatling’s portrait might well belong in another gallery—one dedicated to prominent confidence men in Victorian America. Gatling was certainly an inventor who wanted to earn the trust of the authorities, but one might well wonder if he also fits into a less noble tradition of con men...