First Use

Instead, the Requa guns, five in all, purchased at a cost of $5,482.72 or about $1,100 each, were used by the Federal besiegers of Battery Wagner in front of Charleston, South Carolina, in August 1863. The guns must have made a sort of ripping noise as the fire traveled outward in each direction from the middle, igniting successively each pair of cartridges till the last. They gave the Confederates very little trouble. A ser-

Requa battery gun discharged scythe-sweep of lead which would interdict passage of covered bridge by horse or footmen. Early “machine gun” was not a repeater except so far as fresh clips of cartridges could be loaded, for simultaneous discharge.

geant of the 25th South Carolina Infantry, then in Fort Wagner, reported that they were outranged by the rifles of the garrison. “They seem to have caused so little notice,” writes Aiken Simons, in Army Ordnance, November-December 1934, “that one otherwise very accurate writer attributes them to the Confederate defense. At all events,” Simons concludes, giving them their due claim to fame, “they were the first machine guns with metallic cartridges used in actual combat.”
Whether the Confederates ever used such a gun is difficult to say now authoritatively. Colonel G. M. Chinn, (The Machine Gun, Vol. I) declares positively “There is a record of possession by the Confederate forces of a gun of this design on a fort at Charleston, South Carolina. As it was used for defensive purposes only, and there was no problem of mobility, it was heavier than the field piece type of the North. The Confederate weapon weighed 1,382 pounds, and was of considerably larger caliber than the Northernsion.” Whether Chinn is correct or not, the Requa gun did not achieve any great popularity, despite demonstrations with it by the makers on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange Building late in 1861. With a crew of three men, the gun could be fired at the rate of 7 volleys or 175 shots per minute. The effective range of the .58 caliber projectiles was 1,200 yards.
These curious piano-hinge organs whose song was death were not used to any extent to judge from the purchases made. From David Smith, 36 Liberty Street, New York, Captain Crispin obtained Billinghurst and Requa battery guns and ammunition. The first purchase is listed as December 23, 1862, for 600 cartridge holders and 15,000 cartridge cases, unloaded; in-ferentially, as many as six guns were already in service, say 100 cartridge holders per gun. But later, the nomen-clature is “cartridge clamps,” 550 being bought on July
24, 1864, at $40 per 100, a reduction in price of $10
per hundred. Five guns at $1,000 each were received June 20, 1863; and an additional two guns July 24, 1864, at the same price. Skin cartridges for loading into the metallic cases, percussion caps (“Eley’s double waterproof”) and at one time 600 pounds of “No. 54 swedged bullets” were bought to feed the batteries. David Smith, perhaps a business agent for Rochester-based Billinghurst, received in all $9,724.75 for the seven guns and accessories. From this brief deviation from the trend of rapid fire arms development, at least two or three of the original seven have survived the rigors of war.