Have you ever wondered why there was a stretch of time, a good few centuries from the time muskets were invented to arounds the 1800s, where soldiers just stood in lines waiting to get shot? Have you ever wondered why they didn’t try guerilla warfare, similar to what the US implemented in their civil war? Perhaps you may wonder why society went from epic battlefields of swords and shields clashing against one another to still equally horrifying, but rather boring rows of countless men standing in lines? This is because, simply put, there was no better way to wage battles. Without the invention of automatic (or even semi-automatic) weaponry, muskets and cannons took tens of seconds to reload (if they were being operated by a skilled technician), meaning it was pointless to run at an the enemy for a few moments, simply just to have to pause to reload your musket again. This seemed like a fact of life until the Gatling Gun was created.
The Gatling Gun was an invention that not only brought a shift in how warfare was waged, but how deadly warfare was in general. It was similar to a regular cannon in style, it simply being a gun on two wheels, but according to Matthew Moss of Popular Mechanics, what made it revolutionary was its 10-barrel design. It had ten barrels connected to a single axis in the center, all of which were able to be reloaded through magazines on the top of the barrel. In a single minute, where an ordinary soldier would only be able to get one shot off, the gatling gun was capable of firing off 400 (!) rounds.
While it should be said that this gun only reigned supreme for just a few decades before the machine gun took its place, the gatling gun was the father of all automatic weaponry, and gave birth to a period of warfare that was no longer concerned with attrition and soldier numbers, but money and technology. With the rise of these weapons, the world shifted away from war being a low-casualty “game” where larger nations simply got to push around smaller ones, to a bloody and gruesome battle of grit between nations. 
Works Cited:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a22451/history-gatling-gun/
Cool blog, I didn’t know anything about the gatling gun. It seems like it was extremely destructive, especially at the time of when it was created. It’s always interesting to look at how technology develops over time and how past technology influenced the future.
-Brendan
This is such a cool post. I’ve always thought it was strange how in the older wars each side would just stand there while the other shot at them and took turns doing so. But inventions like these are so cool because they COMPLETELY revolutionized war.