Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun, a multi-barrel firearm with 33 small cannons arranged in three rows.
The weapon appears in Leonardo’s military-engineering drawings. Its barrels were arranged like the pipes of a musical organ, which explains the name. The design was intended to allow several shots to be fired in succession or in a concentrated volley.
Leonardo’s version used a wheeled carriage and multiple barrels rather than a single conventional cannon. The arrangement could improve firing speed, but reloading, aiming, recoil, and moving the weapon would still have presented major practical problems.
The organ gun is often confused with the later mitrailleuse, a rapid-fire weapon with many barrels. Leonardo’s design belongs to the Renaissance era and was not a modern machine gun.