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Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel |
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The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It
Julia Keller - Author
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| Book: Hardcover | 5.98 x 9.01in | 304 pages | ISBN 9780670018949 | 29 May 2008 | Viking Adult | 18 - AND UP |
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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 War—the time in which it was invented—the Gatling gun soon changed the nature of warfare and the course of world history. Discharging two hundred shots per minute with alarming accuracy, the world’s first machine gun became vitally important to protecting and expanding America’s 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 America’s atomic arsenal less than a century later would see it much the same way.
In Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, Julia Keller offers a riveting account of the Gatling gun’s 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 America’s rise as a world superpower.
“With a rat-a-tat pace and a wicked sense of humor, Julia Keller uses the story of Gatling’s famous machine-gun to take us on an exuberant and entertaining tour through American capitalism in the nineteenth-century. This book is a carnival for history buffs – bursting with colorful characters, uncanny connections, and contagious enthusiasm.”
—Debby Applegate, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
“Julia Keller has not only given us the fascinating story of the Gatling gun and its colorful inventor, but has also placed it into a valid and original context. She takes us into the middle of nineteenth century America as it really was: a westward-looking continent packed with dreams, energy, and ambitious practical ideas, a place where mechanical inventions created a vision of limitless power that shaped much of the nation's philosophy and destiny. This is the story of the artifact as changing history, the early machine gun as bringing about as great a transformation as the simple stirrup did in its era. If you haven't heard of Julia Keller, you'll hear of her now.”
—Charles Bracelen Flood, author of Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War and past president of PEN American Center.
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