Leonardo da Vinci sketched an organ gun, a multi-barrel machine for rapid-fire artillery.
The organ gun consisted of a frame carrying many small cannons arranged in rows or a fan-shaped formation. The nickname comes from its resemblance to the pipes of a musical organ. Rather than firing every barrel simultaneously, the arrangement was intended to let crews fire successive volleys, reload, and maintain pressure on an enemy formation.
Leonardo’s military notebooks contain several weapon studies, including artillery, fortifications, and armored vehicles. The organ gun was an improvement in organization and rate of fire, not a true automatic weapon. Each barrel still required loading and ignition, and the gun would have been difficult to move and operate in battle.
The concept is sometimes described as a precursor to the machine gun, but that comparison is only approximate. Modern machine guns use mechanisms for repeated loading, firing, and extraction. Leonardo’s design grouped conventional gun barrels to create concentrated or repeated fire, a distinction that matters when identifying the invention accurately.