Leonardo da Vinci designed an organ gun with multiple barrels arranged like organ pipes.
His design placed many small gun barrels on a frame so they could fire in sequence or in a coordinated volley. The arrangement resembled the pipes of a musical organ, which explains the weapon’s name. The concept aimed to increase the rate of fire compared with a single muzzle-loading gun.
Leonardo’s version is often described as a 33-barrel design. The barrels were arranged in three rows, allowing one row to fire while another could be loaded or repositioned. Like many of his military machines, the drawing shows an engineering proposal rather than a weapon known to have been manufactured by Leonardo.
An organ gun is a firearm, not a musical instrument. It is also distinct from a modern machine gun because each barrel was separately loaded and the mechanism did not use automatic cartridge feeding.