Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun with many small barrels arranged in parallel rows.
The design appears among his military-engineering studies. It consisted of multiple small guns mounted together so that groups of barrels could be fired in sequence. The name comes from the visual resemblance between the parallel barrels and the pipes of a musical organ.
This was not a modern machine gun. The barrels were separate firearms, and reloading remained a major limitation. The arrangement could increase the volume of fire compared with one gun, but it did not provide continuous automatic firing.
Leonardo’s organ gun belongs to a wider European history of volley guns and multi-barrel artillery. His drawings show an effort to solve battlefield problems through coordinated fire, portability, and mechanical organization. As with many of his military designs, surviving drawings do not establish that Leonardo’s exact version entered service.