Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun, a multi-barrel weapon shown with 33 gun barrels.
The weapon arranged small cannons in three rows of eleven barrels. Its name comes from the visual resemblance to the pipes of a musical organ. The arrangement was intended to allow several barrels to fire in sequence or in a concentrated volley, increasing the weapon’s potential rate of fire compared with a single cannon.
Leonardo’s design belongs to a broader Renaissance effort to improve gunpowder artillery. A major practical problem was reloading: after firing, the barrels still had to be cooled, cleaned, and supplied with powder and shot. The design therefore offered tactical advantages but did not eliminate the limitations of early firearms.
The organ gun was not a machine gun in the modern sense. It was a volley weapon using multiple separate barrels, and Leonardo’s version is known primarily from drawings rather than a documented battlefield deployment.