Leonardo da Vinci’s famous organ gun design showed 33 barrels.
The weapon placed many small gun barrels in a broad, fan-shaped arrangement. Leonardo’s drawings suggest that the layout was intended to let an operator fire a large volley across a wide area. Because the barrels were arranged in groups, the weapon could potentially be loaded or fired in stages rather than treated as one ordinary cannon.
The design is commonly called a 33-barrel organ gun because its clustered barrels resemble the pipes of a musical organ. It belongs to a broader family of volley guns, which were developed to put many projectiles into the air quickly. Leonardo’s version remained a design rather than a standard battlefield weapon.
It should not be confused with a modern machine gun. The mechanism depended on black-powder firearms and manual handling, so it lacked the continuous automatic operation associated with later firearms. Its main innovation was concentrated volley fire.