Gatling’s Later Career

Rapid fire inventions followed at a rapid pace. The nations of the world sought out Gatling and he was royally received wherever he went. His host Czar Nicholas treated him to a game of chess, and cautioned his best chess player to “let the Doctor win once or twice.” The master chessman later reported to the Czar that it was all he could do to win against the shrewd playing of the quiet physician who dealt in death.
Russian General Gorloff was sent to Hartford to supervise the fabrication of the Gatling guns for the Czar. In the Colt plant a special section had been set aside to handle the increasing contracts of the Gatling Gun Company of Hartford. The good doctor moved up to Farmington Avenue, and bought a big house next door to Mrs. Colt’s Italian villa with the big plaster Uffizi dogs at the porte cochiere. In Hartford lived Gideon Welles, late Secretary of the Navy in Lincoln’s cabinet. He took a major interest in the Gatling Gun Company and became its Secretary and Treasurer. Down in the South Meadows Armoury, General Gorloff inspected the revolving battery guns in detail and stamped each with his mark of approval, his name in Russian, “Gorloff.”
Back in the Russian Empire the Gatling guns became important to the Czar’s artillery. The name “Gorloff” was all that the cyrillic-reading Russkies could see to understand, and they dubbed the new bundle of barrels light artillery “Gorloffs.” The gun went into production in a Russian Arsenal, possibly Tula or Sestoretsky, rifle factories where the rifle designed by the American Colonel Berdan, of the Sharpshooter regiment, was being made. The usual story is that the Gatling gun was “pirated” by the Russians. The relations between Dr. Gatling and the Czar, who practically gave him the keys to the Winter Palace, suggest a more gentlemanly attitude toward the rights of inventors. It is known, for example, that the contract with Smith and Wesson called for complete sets of gauges for inspecting the work of manufacturing the so-called “Russian Model” .44 revolvers. And in England, all the tools for inspecting the Berdan II rifle were fabricated as a part of the contract and shipped out to Russia along with the specimen rifles. In such open and aboveboard dealings it seems most likely that the Russians also paid for the right to manufacture for their own needs, the designs of the Smith & Wesson, the Berdan II, and the “Gorloff” Gatling guns.
Dr. Gatling reaped the rewards of genius, business acumen, and hard work; an income exceeding $2,000,-
000 in the space of 30 years from his revolving barrel

Electric Vulcan aircraft 20mm cannon described in patent as “Improvement on Gatling Gun" is shown in test stand at Air Armament Center, Eglin AFB, Florida. Six-barrel gun fires up to 8,000 rounds per minute with motor drive.

“battery gun” that was to shorten the Civil War. But Gatling, though no active Southron sympathizer, was robbed by a species of carpet-bagger which infested the North in those halcyon days of national expansion: the railroad stock promoters. Gatling invested heavily in railroads that never went anywhere except to take him to the cleaners. Bad investments and further development of heavy artillery taxed his resources but he remained all his life a gentle man, firm and of strong convictions, but one who lived on in the hearts of his family.

When he had married, his wife received a slave as a wedding present. The senior Gatling, farmer though he was, dependent upon slave labor for his income, had freed 100 slaves before the War at a financial loss which may have amounted to more than $100,000. Dr. Gatling shared his father’s dislike of the “peculiar institution” and on their wedding day he and his new bride, “Jimmy,” (Jemima) freed their slave. The good black woman remained with them as a paid servant until her death in the 1890’s. Thereupon ensued a brief scandal, for Dr. Gatling wanted to bury his faith- ful cook in the family burial plot in Indianapolis. “She is a member of the Gatling family,” he sternly pro- claimed, and would not budge an inch from his declaration. Prevailing against the uncharitable souls who managed Crown Hill Cemetery, the first Negro to be buried there was laid to rest by Dr. Gatling beside his father and his mother in the Gatling family plot.
The big house in Hartford was a beloved retreat for the globe-trotting inventor-medic. He loved the big parlor upholstered in pale blue satin. It had a magnificent crystal chandelier sparkling with the light of a hundred candles as he wined and dined the Russian general, or the representative of the Khedive of Egypt, or the King of Italy, or perhaps the taciturn J. G. Accles who was to establish a dynasty in the metal industries of England, Accles  Pollock, tube benders, offshoot of Accles’ fabrication in England of the Gatling Gun to supply the Crown. Across the hall was a reception room all done in deep red. From some jaunt the doctor had brought back a mechanical bird that nested in its glass pedestal case, and when wound up would sing and turn its head to stare with unwinking eyes at the observer. It was in this house full of memories that Gatling breathed his last.
His granddaughter, Peggy (Mrs. Albert Newcombe), was with him in these moments.
“Grandfather died in my arms when I was about 16, as nearly as I can remember the time. He had just re- turned from downtown in New York City at noon-time,” Mrs. Newcombe wrote to this author. “As was his custom, he said he would have a cat nap before lunch. He cat-napped all through his life. He seemed very old to me, but alert and with a twinkle in his eyes. I covered him up on the couch in my father’s study and left him to snooze, and went down the long hall of the apartment to join Grandmother at our lunch. They had been living with us for some time. I believe at that time Grandfather was out of money, as he’d been spending it to develop a new large gun I remember hearing about. While at lunch the phone rang in my father’s study, and I ran down the hall to answer it. As I lifted it off the hook, I glanced at Grandfather and he seemed to be gasping for breath. It proved to be my father, on the phone, and I asked him to hold on, as Grandfather was on the couch, and looked queer to me. I went to him and lifted up his shoulders. In my arms he gave a big sigh and collapsed. Somehow I knew he had died. I told my father on the phone that Grandfather had just died. He passed away as gently as he lived, for I remember him as gentle voiced and sweet natured. He had the softest, silky white hair, straight and fine; as a child I always loved to stroke it which always made him laugh. He had a very sweet tooth and used to put five lumps of sugar in his cup of tea and also a spot of butter.”
Thus ended the inventor of the Gatling Gun; but not the gun itself. In a way this simple construction, for there is nothing very complicated in the gun’s design has proved as elemental as the wheel. Inaugurated in the 1950’s, a half-century after the inventor’s death, is the modern-day Gatling gun styled by the Air Force “Vulcan.” Delivering a snarling hurricane of steel at the rate of 8,000 shots per minute, the six barrelled air-to-air combat gun is but Dr. Gatling’s basic model, electrified. In 1893 Gatling put an electric motor on his gun, with contra-rotating field coils for the double purpose of reducing the rotational speed to a mere
3,000 shots per minute, and also acting as a brake instantly, by reversing polarity. Both these ingredients were taken into account in designing the modern Vulcan which is, as the patent says, “a Gatling Gun.” The inventor, remembered as a kindly old man, has long since passed into dust, but his Civil War battery gun is still in the Arsenal of the Union.