In the coming years developers would take up the call to arms race and begin development of newer types of volley guns. The Ripley Gun ", made by Ezra Ripley in Troy N.Y, was a six barreled volley gun that never made it out of the production stage"(Chivers, 2010, p. 28). .
The first true machine gun can be contributed to Wilson Ager (Maiorino, 2006, p.216). His "coffee mill"" gun, as coined by President Abraham Lincoln, or the Union Repeating Rifle, was shown to the President in 1861. It fired 120 rounds of .58 caliber paper rounds a minute. It was such a success in the eyes of the President that he purchased 60 of the guns. However it had several weaknesses. For starters the gun itself would over-heat after several minutes of use. In fact, continued use resulted in the barrel spewing hot metal liquids and would make the barrel misshapen (Maiorino, 2006, p.217). It also had a higher rate of failure using the paper cartridges, and it was too heavy to transport. Many army commanders would use the gun at first, and send it back because of the failure. They saw the weapon as simply artillery, and had no place being used in the front lines of battle the way it did(Chivers, 2010, p.34). .
Richard Gatling had previously seen the horrors of war during the Civil War, and noticed that many of the deaths resulted from sickness and disease. "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine gun that would, by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished"(Chivers, 2010, p. 25-26). Gatling utilized the best of the guns at the time, and implemented their design into his own gun; the six barrel design from the Ripley volley gun, and the hand crank operation used by the Coffee-mill gun. The six barrels meant that heat would be evenly distributed between each of the barrels, to prevent over-heating, and the hand crank allowed a continuous flow of fire-power.
