What was the first war to see machine guns used?

American inventor Richard J. Gatling, invented the Gatling Gun in 1861. His intention was to make armies smaller by requiring fewer individually armed troops. The Gatling Gun is a machine gun, but it required a hand-crank to power it. Today's automatic machine guns are powered by gasses and the recoil of fired rounds. The Gatling Gun design of multiple barrels revolving, while cycling through, loading, firing, & ejecting, is still in use today. Modern Gatling Guns are capable of very fast rates of fire and are often found on military aircraft and Navy ships. The Gatling Gun was available to the Union Army during the American Civil War but there were very few bought and used. The Union Army did fit eight of the machine guns to gun boats. Several of the guns were personally bought by Union Army commanders, and used most notably in the siege of Petersburg, VA.

More Info: en.wikipedia.org

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18 Comments

Jon Woolery

A true "machine gun" maintains a continuous output of fire at a steady rate through a gas-operated or gas-assisted mechanism that allows for automatic loading of a cartridge, firing, ejection of the spent cartridge, and reloading etc. A human merely aims and pulls a trigger. A gattling gun, on the other hand, uses a human-cranked system. The first regular use of true machine guns was, I believe, in WWI.

Julie Ann Them

There was a lot of information concerning what constitutes a machine gun and Gatling was not the first pre-machine gun. WW1 is the better answer in my opinion.

majohnson

Guns need to go back to Hell!

majohnson

Very right, American Civil War.

gbluemoon

It would be very helpful if questions like this would be more specific.Some authorities do not consider the hand cranked gatling gun a true machine gun.

blustreak

Machine guns cycle through either gas operation or by the rexoil of the previius round. The Gatling required hand opeeation for each round.

Eric Brown

Got it right even though the correct answer was technically wrong. While the Gatling Gun was the first gun to achieve a very high rate of fire compared to the other guns of that period, but it wasn't truly a machine gun.

esglover

While technical use of the term "machine gun" has varied, the modern definition used by the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute of America is "A fully automatic firearm that loads, fires and ejects continuously when the trigger is held to the rear until the ammunition is exhausted or pressure on the trigger is released."[5] This definition excludes most early manually operated repeating arms such as volley guns and the Gatling gun.