Harnessing centrifugal force these experimental centrifugal machine guns could throw thousands of projectiles a minute. How did they work? Why didn't the idea catch on? With some newly discovered archival footage, that actually shows one of the guns in action, Matt takes a look at what became one...

Please support us at: https://www.patreon.com/capandball Here are some interesting military history stuff: the volley guns were the only effective solutions to increase the firing rate of the muzzleloaders for a long time. Here is the presentation of a seven barrelled piece, that was used in the ...

The Puckle Gun is probably best known as that thing that had round bullets for Christians and square bullets for Turks, but there is much more to it than just that (and in addition, the square bullet version was never actually built). James Puckle designed it in 1718 as a naval defensive weapon t...

Benjamin Hotchkiss was an American artillery designer who moved to Paris in 1867 in hopes of building a business for his improvements in artillery shells. He experienced the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and understood the failure of the French Mitrailleuse multi-barrel volley guns. In his opinion...

The Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon was developed in the 1870s as a competitor to the other manually-operated machine guns of the era, guns like the Gatling, Gardner, and Nordenfelt to name a few. What made the Hotchkiss stand out is that while the other guns were mostly built in rifle calibers, with ...

The mitrailleuse was one of the early types of mechanical machine gun, along with the Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfelt, and others. "Mitrailleuse" was originally a general name for a volley gun - one with many barrels in a cluster, which are fired sequentially (it now means heavy machine gun). The tw...

Thanks to a friendly collector, we had the chance to take out one of the new, gorgeous reproduction 1877 Gatling guns being sold by Colt. It's a near-exact replica, with the added feature of being able to crank backwards to safely clear any loaded cartridges out of the action. Being a Bulldog mod...

The Broadwell drum was one of many feed mechanisms used on the Gatling Gun.

While we were visiting the Institute of Military Technology, we took a few minutes to check out their two 5-barrel Nordenfelt guns and chat with Joe from GardnerGuns.com about them. The Nordenfelt was one of the early manually-operated "machine guns" not seen much in the United States (the Gatlin...