On May 15, 1718, Englishman James Puckle patented his machine gun, the world’s first! You may have thought the Gatling gun or the Maxim machine gun was the first machine gun, but depending on how you define “machine gun” James Puckle, Esq. (yes, he was a lawyer) got there first.
Digging Deeper
Puckle’s invention was a flintlock, the form of firearm ignition at the top of technology of the time. It consisted of a single barrel and a cylinder pre-loaded with 11 separate firing chambers of a musket ball and powder charge in each. Puckle intended regular musket balls for use against Christians, while for fighting Muslims a different cylinder would be used to fire special cubical bullets, which he perceived as extra deadly.
The so called “Puckle Gun” was capable of firing 9 rounds per minute, pathetic by comparison to the 500 to 3000 rounds per minute of today’s machine guns, but not bad when compared to the 2 rounds per minute (3 rounds per minute only by the best musketeers) of musket wielding soldiers of the day.
