Leonardo da Vinci’s organ gun was a weapon design featuring 33 small-caliber guns arranged on a rotating platform.
The device is often called an organ gun because its parallel barrels resemble the pipes of a musical organ. Leonardo’s drawings show the guns mounted in three rows on a triangular or fan-shaped carriage. The platform could be rotated so that one row was aimed while another was loaded, allowing a sustained sequence of shots compared with a single cannon.
The design belongs to Leonardo’s studies of military engineering in the late fifteenth century. His notebooks contain many proposals for improving artillery mobility, rate of fire, and battlefield organization. The organ gun was not a modern machine gun: each barrel still required separate loading and firing, and the period’s gunpowder weapons were slow, smoky, and difficult to handle.
The design is also distinct from Leonardo’s armored vehicle, which is commonly described as an early tank. The organ gun was a concentrated artillery system, while the armored vehicle was a protected mobile platform carrying weapons.