Puckle Gun

In 1718 in London, lawyer James Puckle demonstrated his new invention, the Puckle Gun, a tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock weapon using a revolving cylinder. Using a standard flintlock weapon, a soldier could be expected to fire three times per minute; the Puckle gun could fire up to nine shots per minute. It was the first revolver cannon and of the first guns to use some sort of rotary feed system.

Puckle developed two versions of the basic design. For Christian enemies, he felt that the standard round bullets would be the best ammunition. However, when facing Muslim Turks, he thought that square bullets (which would cause larger, more painful wounds, in his opinion) would be more suitable.

Mr. Puckle could not attract investors to his weapon, he never mass-produced it, nor did he manage to sell this weapon to the British military. The Puckle Gun did not seem to inspire any weapons, it would be nearly a century before multi-barrel handguns like Pepperbox pistols and Revolvers would become common. It shares little with the first manual machine guns (e.g. Gatling gun), whose chambers were mechanically reloaded from a hopper. It did forshadow the use of hand-cranks in manual machine guns, as well rotary chambers for ammo storage decades before they became common. It is also one of the few weapons to have been intended to fire square bullets, rather then rounds ones.

See also

*Revolver cannon