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Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It | 
 enlarge | Author: Julia Keller
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 28509
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0670018945
Dewey Decimal Number: 623.4424
EAN: 9780670018949
ASIN: 0670018945
Publication Date: May 29, 2008
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Product Description
A Pulitzer Prize winner explores the role of the first machine gun in transforming America into a superpower
Although it was little used during the American Civil Warthe time in which it was inventedthe Gatling gun soon changed the nature of warfare and the course of world history. Discharging two hundred shots per minute with alarming accuracy, the worlds first machine gun became vitally important to protecting and expanding Americas overseas interests. Its inventor, Richard Gatling, was famous in his own time for creating and improving many industrial designs, from bicycles and steamship propellers to flush toilets. A man of great business and scientific acumen, Gatling actually proposed his gun as a way of saving lives, thinking it would decrease the size of armies and, therefore, make it easier to supply soldiers and reduce malnutrition deaths. The scientists who unleashed Americas atomic arsenal less than a century later would see it much the same way.
In Mr. Gatlings Terrible Marvel, Julia Keller offers a riveting account of the Gatling guns invention, its misunderstood creator, and its tremendous impact on American and world events. She also shows how the gun, in its combination of ingenuity, idealism, and destructive power, perfectly exemplified the paradox of Americas rise as a world superpower.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Term paper time August 25, 2008
Did you ever have to write a term paper on something you knew NOTHING about? You'd repeat the title, rearrange it and the repeat it again and then add in irrelevant asides, anything to generate words in a futile attempt to cover up the fact that you had NOTHING to say about the subject.
This book is one of those term papers. "More than a biography" says one of the "top reviewers". How about "where's the biography"?
About the only things I learned about Gatling was his name, that he moved to St Louis and that he got smallpox. That's it for a whole book.
There's lots of sociological waffle about mid nineteenth American territorial and technical development. A lot of talk about how the Civil war was relevant. But there's close to zilch on what is supposed to be the subject of this book - the man and his gun.
I want my money back.
 Ms. Keller's Bad Book July 20, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book assuming that it it was a biography revealing details of how Gatling's life developed to lead him toward his many accomplishments. it is not; rather it is nine tenths sociological asides. There errors of fact misunderstandings of analysis, poor and inadequate illustrations and in general was a disappointing and frustrating read. I did read it but not happily.
 An Inventor's Place in American History July 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Americans have affection for the inventor, the fellow that builds a better mousetrap or even just tinkers away in the basement attempting to make cold fusion happen. But we are nowadays conflicted about armaments; whoever that guy was who invented napalm we might not hold in much esteem. What are we to make of the man who invented the machine gun? He wrote in 1877, "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could, by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies." Whether he was really so naive, or whether he was deliberately trying to make his machine gun seem a tool of peace (the excuse used by every arms-maker or arms-dealer), isn't entirely clear. What is clear is that his invention made his name, a name you probably know even if you don't know the details of his life or gadget. In _Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It_ (Viking), journalist and essayist Julia Keller tells all about this influential American inventor, and looks at many larger issues in American history as well. "The Gatling gun is a weapon of death," she writes, "but its story is not altogether grim. For it is also the story of a nation on the rise and of a man who, by inventing a new kind of machine, helped propel it in that upward trajectory."
Richard Jordan Gatling was born in North Carolina in 1818. He was a born tinkerer, not a farmer or store owner, occupations he had tried before his first invention came to him. He invented a seed planter that contained seeds in a hopper and dropped them one by one into just the right placement in the furrow, a great improvement over flinging seeds in all directions. Keller believes that the idea of the seed dropping into just the right place was transformed into bullets in a hopper dropping into just the right breach (of six) for Gatling's most famous invention. Gatling's machine, which looks like a small cannon on a tripod, with a circular hopper for bullets mounted above the breech and a "coffee grinder" handle to make the six barrels go around, wasn't the first attempt at a machine gun, but it was certainly the best. It worked efficiently and reliably, and should have been immediately taken up by the Union Army, but it was not. The arms-buying division of the Army was too conservative to experiment. The Gatling gun's most notable use during the years of the Civil War didn't even require it to be fired. There were bloody riots against the draft in 1863 in New York City, and the police stationed Gatling guns on rooftops. The intimidation worked and the mobs backed down. It had real use in the Spanish-American war, and Teddy Roosevelt valued it. Part of the Gatling gun's image problem is that it was bought by many foreign governments and colonial powers to suppress native populations who had no weapons to match the Gatling's efficiency.
So Richard Gatling may have hoped to bring peace, and at times his intimidating device calmed a situation by its mere appearance and not by causing rapid and multiple deaths. He would have liked those instances. His gadget, however, did bring a new industrialization to warfare. He was a decent man whose deadly gun was the making of his fortune and his fame; he went on to patent many other inventions, including a bicycle, a device to control wagon reins, and two years before he died in 1903, a new type of flush toilet. No one remembers those, of course. Keller's informative book, however, convincingly shows that like more famous figures such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, Gatling played an important role in changing the rural antebellum America into an industrialized nation.
 Gatling July 4, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
The book should have contained pictures of how the invention actually worked. Diagrams would have been helpful in order to understand why this gun worked and why it worked so efficiently.
"America at its muscular, can-do best..."? June 16, 2008
3 out of 9 found this review helpful
One of the merits (and there are many) of Julia Keller's Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel is that the book is more than a biography of Richard Jordan Gatling (1818-1903), inventor of the automatic weapon which bears his name. It's also a well-written, well-researched, and insightful reflection on American self-identity and the icons by which we define ourselves.
We think of ourselves as humanitarian, ingenious, curious, mechanically skillful, industrious, problem-solving, determined, and upwardly mobile (the rags-to-riches aspect of the Great American Dream). As Keller points out, Gatling came to symbolize all these qualities. In the last quarter-century of his life, he was frequently pointed to as a man who personified the best of American qualities. His best known invention, the Gatling gun, was enshrined as "a laudable American accomplishment, another example of native ingenuity and craftsmanship and problem-solving acumen: America at its muscular, can-do best."
But as Ms. Keller also points out, there's a certain irony to all this. Gatling invented his gun in the hopes that its incredible killing power would end the Civil War quickly. As Keller says, the gun's "brutal spit-spot efficiency would, [Gatling] hoped, persuade nations of the waste and folly of war."
In fact, however, military conservatism sidelined its use on the battlefield. The only time it was used during the conflict was against civilians in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. It would be much used--some might say over-used--in the succeeding decades in the Indian Wars and by federal troops and state militia against striking workers. Foreign governments bought thousands of the guns to acquire and hold onto colonies, and Teddy Roosevelt, hero of the Spanish-American War, claimed that the Gatling was the decisive factor (along with Teddy himself, of course) in defeating the Spanish. Much like Alfred Nobel and his dynamite, then, Richard Jordan Gatling found his "humanitarian" invention used in quite nonhumanitarian muscular ways.
There's also irony in other aspects of Gatling's life too: after he sold the Gatling patent to Colt, his financial fortunes dipped; and although he continued inventing right up to the end of his life (his patents include a flushable toilet), he would forever be remembered almost exclusively for his killing machine.
America, argues Ms. Keller, has always had an ambivalent attitude to weapons (probably because their use against other humans tends to upset part of our self-identity as humanitarian). In the earliest days of the Republic, statesmen debated about them. That debate was cast in a completely different light by Gatling's invention of his lethal gun, which not only helped change the face of warfare, but also influenced the way in which Americans and the rest of the world thought about the ethics (and aesthetics) of killing in wartime. As Keller notes, killing became more impersonal, less one-on-one. Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel invites readers to reflect deeply on these kinds of issues.
Highly recommended.
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