Ancient, British and World Coins and Banknotes

United States of America, Centenary of the Gatling Gun, 1961, a bronze medal, unsigned, bust of Richard Gatling right, rev. battery gun, made by colt’s patent fire arms, etc, 60mm; together with other bronze medals (3) [4]. Very fine and better (£30-40)

Richard Jordan Gatling (1818-1903) from Money's Neck, North Carolina, studied medicine and dentistry but never practised. He developed a mechanical weapon, the Gatling Gun, comprising six barrels mounted in a revolving frame, and patented it in 1862; later versions, with ten barrels, fired 320 rounds a minute. The US army started buying weapons from Gatling in 1865 and he opened a new factory in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1870. Gatling continued to improve his design and by the mid 1880s it could fire up to 1,200 rounds per minute, but sales declined after Hiram Maxim began production of his automatic Maxim machine gun, invented in 1884