Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun, a multi-barrelled firearm arranged with rows of gun tubes.
The name comes from the visual resemblance between the parallel barrels and the pipes of a musical organ. Leonardo's version was intended to fire many small cannonballs in a volley, increasing the chance of hitting targets and allowing one group of barrels to be prepared while another was fired.
The weapon belongs to a wider family of volley guns used in different forms before and after Leonardo's lifetime. It should not be confused with Leonardo's separate multi-barrelled cannon concepts or with the later machine gun.
Leonardo's drawings show how he applied mechanical organization to battlefield problems. As with many of his military designs, the surviving sketches do not establish that he built and successfully used the complete weapon.