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Show Inventor of Gatling Gun Richard Jordan Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, was born in Hertford eounty, N. C, in 1818. While a boy he assisted his father in the invention of a machine for sowing cottonseed. Subsequently he invented a rice-sowing machine, later lat-er adapted to sowing wheat in drills. He graduated in medicine at Cincinnati, Cin-cinnati, but before establishing himself him-self in practice conceived the basic idea of the gun which afterward made him famous. In 1861 he built the first types of the revolving battery bat-tery gun known as Gatling. This was improved in 1865 and immediately immedi-ately adopted by the United States government. In 1886 he invented a new gun metal of steel and aluminum. alum-inum. Congress soon afterward voted him $40,000 to perfect a new method of casting cannon. He died in 1903. |