Leonardo da Vinci sketched an organ gun with several barrels arranged around a platform.
An organ gun is a multi-barrel firearm whose tubes can be fired in sequence or together. Leonardo’s design used rows of small cannon barrels mounted on a wheeled frame. The arrangement was intended to increase the rate of fire while allowing one group of barrels to cool as another group was used.
The nickname “Leonardo’s machine gun” is common, but it can cause confusion. The weapon was not a modern automatic machine gun: it required manual loading, ignition, and repositioning. Its barrels were separate, and its operation depended on coordinated crews.
Leonardo studied many military devices while working for Italian courts. His drawings show practical concerns such as mobility, cooling, and concentrated fire, even though the proposed weapon was not a modern mass-produced firearm.