Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun with 33 small gun barrels arranged in rows.
The weapon appeared in his military-engineering studies as a way to fire multiple shots in succession. The barrels were arranged like the pipes of a musical organ, giving the device its name. A carriage could support the rows and allow the weapon to be repositioned.
The design aimed to combine concentrated fire with faster reloading than a single-barrel weapon. It was a proposal rather than proof that Leonardo built a fully operational battlefield gun.
The organ gun should not be confused with a conventional cannon or arquebus. Those weapons generally use one principal barrel, whereas an organ gun’s defining feature is its multiple-barrel arrangement. Later multi-barrel firearms developed similar ideas in different forms.