Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun using a cluster of many barrels.
The weapon, sometimes called a thirty-three-barrel organ, arranged small cannon barrels in rows on a wheeled frame. The layout was intended to fire repeated volleys and reduce the delay between shots. Leonardo’s design belonged to a period when military engineers were searching for ways to make gunpowder weapons more mobile and effective.
The name “organ gun” comes from the visual resemblance between the parallel barrels and the pipes of a musical organ. It was not an organ that played music, and it did not use a single barrel capable of automatic fire. Each barrel still required loading, and the mechanism depended on the technology of Renaissance gunpowder weapons.
There is no firm evidence that Leonardo’s exact multi-barrel design entered battlefield service. It is best understood as a proposed rapid-volley weapon. Similar clustered-barrel weapons were developed by other designers in Europe and Asia, so Leonardo was not the sole inventor of the general idea.