In the middle of the 19th century, infantry on the battlefield were still stuck with slow singleshot muzzle loading rifles, and even a well-trained soldier could only fire two or three rounds a minute.

Commanders were staring at horrific casualty lists from wars like the American Civil War, and were desperate for some way to put more bullets into the air without simply throwing more bodies at the problem.

It was in this world that Dr.

Richard Jordan Gatling stepped forward [music] with a radical idea.

Gatling was an inventor, and what struck him most about the war was that more soldiers were dying from disease than from actual gunshots, he [music] convinced himself that if he could create a gun that fired incredibly fast, one man could do the work of a hundred.

Armies could be smaller and fewer men would be exposed to those deadly camps where illness spread like wildfire.

That almost humanitarian logic that a deadlier weapon might actually shorten wars and save lives sat behind his invention of the Gatling gun in 1861.

Mechanically, the Gatling gun was a very clever piece of engineering.

It used a cluster of barrels, at [music] first six and later as many as 10, arranged around a central shaft and turned by a hand crank.

As the operator cranked the handle, each barrel in turn passed through a full cycle of loading, firing, and ejecting.

[music] A gravity-fed magazine or hopper on top dropped a cartridge into the breach of a barrel as it came into position.

Then, a cam-driven mechanism slammed that round home and fired it at around the 4:00 position.

As the barrel rotated downward, the [music] spent casing was extracted and ejected out the bottom.

By spreading the work across multiple barrels and automating the feed with cams, the Gatling gun could fire far faster than any [music] single soldier at the time could even imagine.

Early six barrel models could put out about 150 rounds per [music] minute, being the biggest bottleneck, but Gatling kept refining the design.

By the 1880s, with better all- metal cartridges and a more advanced cam system, some models were firing around 400 rounds per minute.

There was even an experimental electric motor drive that Gatling [music] tinkered with, pushing past 1,200 rounds per minute.

However, the technology at the time was still too unreliable for that kind [music] of speed.

So, it remained a curiosity rather than a practical weapon.

But remember that number because it’s going to matter later.

But by then, a completely different approach was about to push the Gatling aside.

[music] In 1883, Hyram Maxim introduced his fully automatic singlebarrel machine gun, which harnessed the recoil of the fired cartridge to eject the spent case and reload the next round without any hand [music] cranking at all.

Within a few years, improved gas or recoil operated machine guns based on Maxim’s design could match or exceed the firing rates of Gatlings with much less bulk, just one barrel, and smaller [music] crews.

When smokeless powder arrived in the 1890s, which removed the huge white clouds of smoke that black powder Gatlings produced, those new Maxims and their descendants utterly dominated the battlefield.

Military shifted to water cooled, beltfed machine guns instead of heavy carriage-mounted rotary guns.

By 1911, the US Army officially declared the crank operated Gatling gun obsolete.

The multiarrel concept seemed to be a dead end, a clever 19th century idea that had been overtaken by more elegant engineering.

No one could have guessed at the time that it would take another global war and a completely new kind of problem to pull Gatling’s old concept out of the grave and turn it into something far more destructive than he ever imagined.

The problem was jet aircraft.

During World War II, fighter aircraft were propeller-driven and piston engineed.

They were fast for their time and reasonably wellarmed, but the firepower came from autoc cannons with limited magazine capacity and heavy machine guns [music] that had reached the practical limit of single barrel rate of fire.

designers tried adding more guns to increase the volume of fire, but that added weight and took up space on the aircraft and eventually that approach hit its own ceiling.

Then after the war, jet fighters arrived and made [music] everything that came before completely obsolete.

Jets were so much faster than piston fighters [music] that the entire nature of aerial combat changed.

At jet speeds, an enemy aircraft could flash through a pilot’s gun [music] site in a split second.

If you wanted to actually hit anything during a dog fight, your guns had to throw out a ridiculous number of rounds in [music] that tiny window of opportunity.

The US Air Force learned very quickly that its standard fighter armament of 650 caliber Browning machine [music] guns just wasn’t enough anymore.

Those heavy machine guns fired about 800 rounds per minute each.

But their bullets were now too small and too [music] light to reliably tear apart tougher jet aircraft, which were increasingly protected by armor around key components.

They tried stepping up to 20 mm autoc cannons like the [music] M39, which fired a much heavier shell at around 15 to,700 rounds per minute.

On paper, this looked like the solution, but in practice, it still fell short.

Engineers had run into a hard wall.

Trying to push one barrel to extreme speeds meant it would cook off rounds prematurely or seize up entirely.

If jets were going to fight with guns at all, they needed something completely different.

And that meant looking again at Gatling’s old multiarrel idea.

So in 1946, the Air Force and Army Ordinance launched what they called Project Vulcan.

The basic concept was to take Richard Gatling’s 19th century principle of several barrels rotating around a central axis, update it with modern materials and precision machining, and then drive the whole thing with an external power source, either an electric or hydraulic motor instead of a hand crank.

External power meant the gun didn’t have to rely on recoil or gas pressure to cycle, which freed designers to push the rate of fire up to levels no conventional machine gun could handle.

Multiple barrels meant no single barrel had to cope with all that heat by itself, even while the weapon was spitting out thousands of rounds per minute.

To prove this was more than just theory, engineers Melvin Johnson and Colonel George Chin dug out an antique Gatling gun from a museum in late 1945, bolted an electric motor to it, and ran live fire tests.

That 60-year-old gun designed in the Black Powder Age [music] suddenly fired bursts at 5,000 rounds per minute, and the mechanism held together.

Apart from the huge clouds of smoke from oldstyle ammunition, the test was a complete success [music] and convinced the doubters that the rotary externally powered concept could work.

By 1949, General Electric was already building modern prototypes for aircraft.

The result of that work was the M61 Vulcan, a sixbarrel 20 mm rotary cannon that would go on to arm almost every American jet fighter for decades.

General Electric’s first prototype in 1949 reached about 2,500 [music] rounds per minute.

By 1950, an improved version hit the target of 6,000 rounds per minute, which works out to 100 rounds every single second.

There were feed system problems to solve.

But once those were worked out, the Vulcan was standardized and started appearing in frontline jets in the mid 1950s.

A pilot could now make a very short firing pass and still saturate the air in front of an enemy with a dense stream of 20 mm shells, massively increasing the chance of a hit.

By the time of the Vietnam War, Vulcanarmed F105s and F4s were scoring first air-to-air kills, shooting down Soviet built MIGs.

Now, once that was proven in 20 mm, another [music] question naturally followed.

If this rotary system worked so well for big cannons on fighters, why not scale it down? A smaller version would still deliver enormous firepower, but in a form that could fit on platforms where a full-size Vulcan would be too heavy or too violent.

That line [music] of thinking led straight to the 762x 51 mm minigun, effectively a miniature Vulcan that fired rifle caliber ammunition instead of cannon shells.

By 1962, General Electric had [music] working prototypes of a 762 mm sixbarrel machine gun that could fire up to around 6,000 rounds per [music] minute, just like its big brother in the jets.

The US Army adopted it under the designation [music] M134, and it entered service around 1963 to 64.

After roughly half a century in the grave, Gatling’s 19th century concept had been resurrected in two very different forms.

And now this strange overpowered rifle caliber gatling was about to meet helicopters, jungles, and the Vietkong.

When the US ramped up its involvement in Vietnam in the early 1960s, [music] it introduced a new kind of warfare built around airmobile operations.

Helicopters like the UH1 Huey could quickly transport troops into combat, inserting them directly into landing zones deep in enemy territory.

However, early in the conflict, these helicopters were lightly armed or completely unarmed, and that quickly proved disastrous.

A typical troop carrying Huey might have just two door gunners, each armed with a standard M60 machine gun, firing at a cyclic rate of about 550 rounds per minute.

This setup gave some covering fire to troops during landing, but in reality, it wasn’t nearly enough.

The Vietkong adapted quickly, worked out American tactics, and set up ambushes at landing zones.

Without heavier armorament, helicopters were sitting ducks, and [music] this was proven during the Vietnam War more than enough times.

The Army and Air Force quickly realized that a high rate of fire weapon was perfect for helicopter operations.

A Huey in a hover or slow approach is an easy target, but if it could pour thousands of [music] rounds per minute into the brush around the landing zone, it could suppress the enemy long enough to safely deliver the troops.

In 1964 and 65, the first miniguns were tested on helicopters and quickly mounted in a variety of configurations.

Some Hueies had flexible door mounts with an M134, replacing the slower M60, giving the door gunner a far more powerful weapon.

Other Hueies, converted into gunship variants, had miniguns fixed in side pods or chin turrets [music] aimed by the pilot.

By the late 1960s, the standard Army UH1 gunship configuration was the [music] XM21 armament subsystem, which mounted a minigun on each side of the helicopter [music] alongside rocket launchers.

The dedicated attack helicopter, the AH1G [music] Cobra, introduced in 1967, took this even further.

The Cobra’s nose turret could carry a minigun paired with a grenade launcher aimed by the gunner and sometimes with additional miniguns mounted on stub wings.

The Huey and Cobra were no longer just flying transport vehicles.

They were heavily armed gunships bristling with firepower, and the minigun was the centerpiece.

From the moment minigun equipped helicopters saw combat, pilots and crews realized the immense power they [music] now had.

The M134 could be set to fire at either 2,000 or 4,000 rounds per minute, allowing for either shorter controlled bursts or full cyclic fire.

When a Huey equipped with a door minigun flew Escort for a troop landing, it could literally blanket the tree line with bullets in seconds, cutting down hidden snipers or machine gun teams before they could do any real damage.

The slight vibration of the rotary barrels actually helped in a way, creating a wider beaten zone that sprayed an area with bullets rather than concentrating rounds in a single spot.

Of course, the ammunition consumption was [music] enormous.

A Huey gunship might carry 1,500 to 2,000 rounds per minigun and could burn through that in under a minute of fire.

But in practice, short bursts were used to conserve ammunition, and those bursts were incredibly effective at suppressing enemy positions.

During the Idrang Valley campaign in November 1965, the first major battle between US forces and North Vietnamese regulars armed Hueies with rapidfire miniguns proved invaluable in protecting landing zones and breaking up mass attacks on isolated American units.

Vietkong and North Vietnamese fighters who survived minigun attacks later described red streaks appearing from the sky, whole patches of jungle being torn apart in seconds.

One moment you’re shooting at a helicopter and the [music] next the air around you simply erupts.

There was no time to react.

Veteran door gunner Jim Curry described the [music] traces as looking like a red laser beam reaching out from the helicopter.

And anyone caught in that beam went down, often hit multiple times before they even understood what was happening.

For American troops, the sound of the minigun meant safety.

For the Vietnamese fighters, it became one of the most dreaded sounds of the entire war.

Now, after the Vietnam [music] War ended, the M134 didn’t disappear.

The US government had purchased roughly 10,000 of these guns.

So, there was a huge stockpile sitting in the system.

Many were mothballled or scrapped, but a fair number stayed in service as door guns on helicopters.

On the larger fixedwing gunships like the AC130 Spectre, the minigun actually got phased out quite early.

You see, against hardened targets, the 76 2mm rounds simply weren’t powerful enough.

By the early 1970s, new AC-130 versions dropped the miniguns entirely and standardized on 20mm Vulcans, 40mm bowors, and eventually 105mm howitzer.

Then around 1990, something [music] interesting happened.

A company called Dylan Arrow acquired a large batch of surplus miniguns from a foreign user.

And when they examined what they had bought, most of the guns were worn to the point of being unreliable.

Instead of scrapping them, Dylan began systematically fixing the problems.

And that work snowballed into a complete redesign.

They re-engineered the feed system, improved the bolt and housing, and by the time they were done, they had essentially rebuilt the gun from the ground up.

Word of these upgrades reached the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and by 1997, they started buying the improved components.

A few years later, Dylan was building complete modernized systems from scratch.

And in 2003, the army officially designated it M134D, essentially the second generation of the minigun.

They even created titanium variants that cut the weight from 62 lb down to [music] about 41 while increasing the service life to around 1.

5 million rounds.

That’s far beyond what any conventional [music] machine gun could survive.

So, here we are today and Richard Gatling’s 19th century idea, the one that was officially declared obsolete back in 1911, is still going