Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It

by Julia Keller

Overview

A provocative look at the life and times of the man who created the original weapon of mass destruction

Drawing on her investigative and literary talents, Julia Keller offers a riveting account of the invention of the world's first working machine gun. Through her portrait of its misunderstood creator, Richard Jordan Gatling-who naively hoped that the overwhelming effectiveness of a multiple-firing weapon would save lives by decreasing the size of armies and reducing the number of soldiers needed to fight-Keller draws profound parallels to the scientists who would unleash America's atomic arsenal half a century later. The Gatling gun, in its combination of ingenuity, idealism, and destructive power, perfectly exemplifies the paradox of America's rise in the nineteenth century to a world superpower.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143115649
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/26/2009
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Julia Keller is a Pulitzer Prize–winning write, educator, and former journalist. Schools she has taught at include Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago. She has served four times as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes, and won a Pulitzer Prize of her own in 2004 for her work with the Chicago Tribune. She is the author of the nonfiction book Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel and several works of fiction.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Cold Beauty 17

Chapter 2 A World of Mornings 53

Chapter 3 Land Of The Second Chance 89

Chapter 4 "Drunkards, Dandies & Loafers" 113

Chapter 5 The Spaces Between the Bullets 141

Chapter 6 "A Little Gatling Music" 173

Chapter 7 "The World's Great Storm" 207

Chapter 8 Warriors And Sages 225

Acknowledgments 245

Notes 247

Bibliography 271

Index 285

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This book is a carnival...bursting with colorful characters, uncanny connections, and contagious enthusiasm." —-Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America

Editorial Reviews

"A lively and well-informed biographical study . . . Keller's great gift, along with sprightly prose . . . is contextualization."
-Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

With a rat-a-tat pace and a wicked sense of humor, Julia Keller uses the story of Gatling's famous machine-gun to take us on an exuberant and entertaining tour through American capitalism in the nineteenth-century. This book is a carnival for history buffs – bursting with colorful characters, uncanny connections, and contagious enthusiasm. (Debby Applegate, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher)

Debby Applegate

Julia Keller has not only given us the fascinating story of the Gatling gun and its colorful inventor, but has also placed it into a valid and original context. She takes us into the middle of nineteenth century America as it really was: a westward-looking continent packed with dreams, energy, and ambitious practical ideas, a place where mechanical inventions created a vision of limitless power that shaped much of the nation's philosophy and destiny. This is the story of the artifact as changing history, the early machine gun as bringing about as great a transformation as the simple stirrup did in its era. If you haven't heard of Julia Keller, you'll hear of her now. (Charles Bracelen Flood, author of Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War and past president of PEN American Center.)

Charles Bracelen Flood

Passionate biography of the inventor of the first practical machine gun. Son of a prosperous farmer and inventor, Richard Gatling (1818-1903) designed a screw propeller to drive ships at age 17. Unfortunately, his application arrived at the Patent Office only months after John Ericsson's similar device revolutionized ship transport. At 26, Gatling struck it rich with a seed planter that enabled farmers to sow in uniform rows instead of scattering seeds by hand; he filed nine more agricultural patents over the next two decades. The 1790 U.S. patent law was a historic achievement, points out Chicago Tribune culture critic Keller. Making it cheap and easy for Americans to profit from an invention, it became the engine of an explosion of technical advances. In 1861, Gatling used a rotary mechanical principle similar to that of his seed planter in a patent for the first useful rapid-fire "battery gun." Despite his energetic efforts, conservative Union ordinance officials rejected it. First-time author Keller contradicts historians who claim the first Gatling was clumsy and unreliable; it worked fine from the beginning, she demonstrates. The army reversed itself in 1866, armies throughout the world quickly followed and the Gatling remained in use until the 1890s. Because this is such an interesting history, it's regrettable that Keller is so eager to improve material that doesn't require improvement. She adopts fashionable fictional devices such as writing in the present tense ("The wide world beckons. Gatling is leaving home, mounting his horse for the daunting and perilous 737-mile journey.") and revealing her hero's inner thoughts: "No, no, no. His head was too full of all the things hewanted to build."Overheated prose only slightly mars this colorful portrait of an underappreciated American inventor and his times. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky/Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency

Kirkus Reviews

The author presents as a genius, a man of decency, vision, and ambition who held dozens of patents for a variety of life—enhancing gadgets, including plows, bicycles, flush toilets, and dry-cleaning machines.”

Booklist

This book is a carnival...bursting with colorful characters, uncanny connections, and contagious enthusiasm.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous M Debby Applegate