Richard Jordan Gatling

Richard Jordan Gatling (1818 to 1903) was an American inventor best known for the Gatling gun, regarded as the first successful machine gun. Born in Hertford County, North Carolina, he worked in a county clerk's office, taught school and traded as a merchant before moving to St. Louis, where he invented a rice-sowing machine and a wheat drill. He took a medical degree at the Ohio Medical College in 1850 but never practiced, preferring to invent. In Indianapolis at the start of the American Civil War he perfected a rapid-fire gun based on his seed planter, and in 1862 he founded the Gatling Gun Company to market it. Over his later life he patented improvements to toilets, bicycles, wool cleaning and pneumatic power, worked on steam plows and tractors, and in 1891 became the first president of the American Association of Inventors and Manufacturers.