Leonardo da Vinci designed a 33-barrel organ gun, a multi-barrel weapon arranged on a wheeled frame.
The name “organ gun” refers to the visual resemblance between grouped gun barrels and the pipes of a musical organ. Leonardo’s design placed 33 small cannons in three rows of 11. The arrangement was intended to allow one row to fire while another cooled or was loaded, improving sustained use compared with a single cannon.
The weapon remained a design rather than a documented battlefield invention by Leonardo. It belongs to a period when European armies were experimenting with gunpowder artillery, portable firearms, and mechanisms for faster reloading.
The 33-barrel organ is often called a “machine gun,” but that modern label can mislead. It did not use automatic loading or continuous fire. Its significance lies in coordinated volleys from multiple barrels, not in the operating principle of a modern machine gun.