Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun, a multi-barrel weapon arranged like the pipes of a musical organ.
His military sketches show rows of small gun barrels mounted on a frame. The arrangement allowed many projectiles to be fired in a broad volley, potentially giving infantry a concentrated burst of fire. The name comes from the visual resemblance between the barrels and organ pipes.
Leonardo’s version was a proposed design rather than a modern machine gun. Reloading remained slow, and the weapon’s practical battlefield performance would have depended on its construction, ammunition, and crew.
An organ gun is different from a single-barrel cannon and from a later rotating machine gun. Its defining feature is the group of fixed barrels firing together or in sequence.