Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun that arranged 33 small cannons in three rows.
The weapon was intended to fire a rapid sequence of shots. Its name comes from the resemblance between the parallel gun barrels and the pipes of a musical organ. Leonardo’s arrangement placed the barrels on a broad frame so that one row could be fired while another was raised or reloaded.
The concept addressed a major weakness of Renaissance artillery: slow reloading. A conventional cannon could deliver a powerful shot, but crews needed time to prepare it again. Multiple barrels offered a way to produce repeated fire without waiting for every barrel to be reloaded immediately.
The organ gun was a design rather than a proven battlefield system created by Leonardo. It also differed from a modern machine gun, which uses a single repeating mechanism or continuously fed ammunition. Leonardo’s proposal relied on many separate barrels.