Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel

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

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.”