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Title details for Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel by Julia Keller - Available

Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel

The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It

by Julia Keller
Norman Dietz
Audiobook
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Soon after its debut at the time of the Civil War, the Gatling gun changed the nature of warfare and the course of world history. Discharging 200 shots per minute with alarming accuracy, the world's first machine gun became vitally important to protecting and expanding America's overseas interests. Its inventor, Richard Gatling, was famous in his own time for creating and improving many industrial designs, from bicycles and steamship propellers to flush toilets, though it was the gun design that would make his name immortal. A man of great business and scientific acumen, Gating used all the resources of the new mass age to promote sales across America and around the world.


Ironically, Gatling actually proposed his gun as a way of saving lives, thinking it would decrease the size of armies and, therefore, make it easier to supply soldiers and reduce malnutrition deaths. The scientists who unleashed America's atomic arsenal less than a century later would see it much the same way.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 16, 2008

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781400126446
      • File size: 288901 KB
      • Duration: 10:01:52

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The creation of the first machine gun, after the Civil War, is documented in ornate detail in this fascinating account of inventor Richard Gatling's most innovative creation. Though it's the gun that unquestionably changed the world--for better or worse--the man behind the machine is also profiled, due to his relative obscurity. Narrator Norman Dietz delivers the text with an unbiased voice capable of garnering high praise for Gatling's adroitness while also inducing an alarming sense of regret and penitence at the weapon's effects. There exists a subtle irony in Dietz's tone through much of the reading as he relates Gatling's original intention of creating a weapon that would actually save lives by removing soldiers from harm's way. Thus, Deitz jousts left and right with ideology as he passionately relates the "terrible paradox" of the Gatling gun. L.B. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 3, 2008
      Keller, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, analyzes the nexus between invention and culture in this incisive and instructive cultural history cum biography. Her subject is the iconic Gatling gun, the “first successful machine gun,” and its inventor, Richard Jordan Gatling, a 19th-century tinkerer and entrepreneur. A gifted amateur inventor, he registered his first patent—for a mechanical seed planter—in 1844 and had 43 lifetime patents. In 1862, with the Civil War raging, Gatling invented a six-barrel, rapid-firing (200 rounds per minute) gun based on his seed planter. Initially rejected by the Union army, the gun finally came into use in 1866 as a “bully and enforcer” against striking workers and in the Indian Wars; its legacy—“the mechanization of death”—didn't become fully apparent until the killing fields of WWI. A celebrity in the 19th century, Gatling was soon reviled for his “terrible marvel” and then consigned to obscurity. Keller rescues Gatling and anchors his remarkable life firmly in the landscape of 19th-century America: a time and place of “egalitarian hope and infinite possibility.”

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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