MACHINE GUNS
A rifle is really a machine for hurling small projectiles. During the Civil War a Chicago physician named Gatling fell to pondering over the inefficiency of using a machine that would fire only one bullet at a time with a considerable interval of time between shots for reloading, and he hit upon the idea of developing a machine that would discharge a continuous stream of bullets. So he built a ten-barrel revolving gun operated by a hand crank. The barrels were automatically loaded and fired one after the other. Although it was slow to accept the Gatling machine gun, the U. S. Army after once accepting it was loath to give it up even after better machine guns were invented.