Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun with 33 small gun barrels arranged on a rotating frame.
The weapon’s nickname comes from the visual resemblance between its parallel barrels and the pipes of a musical organ. Leonardo’s arrangement was intended to let several guns fire in sequence or in a coordinated volley, increasing the speed of repeated shooting compared with loading one barrel at a time.
The design appeared in Leonardo’s military studies and is commonly associated with a wheeled battlefield carriage. It was a proposed firearm system, not a modern machine gun with automatic loading and continuous fire.
Leonardo’s military notebooks include many weapons that were never built or tested at full scale. The organ gun shows how he combined mechanical layout, mobility, and firepower in a single design.