Leonardo da Vinci sketched a 33-barrel organ gun as a rapid-firing artillery concept.
The design arranged 33 small gun barrels in three rows on a wheeled frame. The name “organ gun” comes from the visual resemblance to the pipes of a musical organ. The arrangement was intended to let one row fire while another cooled or was reloaded, increasing the weapon’s practical rate of fire compared with a single cannon.
Leonardo’s drawing is associated with his studies of military engineering in the late fifteenth century. Like many of his weapons designs, it was a concept rather than a confirmed battlefield machine. Black-powder artillery of the period faced major limits involving smoke, reload time, barrel strength, and ammunition handling.
The weapon is sometimes confused with the modern machine gun because both use multiple barrels. An organ gun still fired separate black-powder projectiles and lacked the self-loading mechanism of later firearms.