#Mitrailleuse

The Puckle Gun is one of those firearms of which only a couple of examples exist in the world, but which is covered in a great deal of introductory firearms books, usually in their section on the history of machine guns.

Not for a lack of vision did 18th and early 19th Century weapons designers fail to create successful automatic weapons. Attempts were made to facilitate fully repeating, automatic fire as early as they could be conceived with the technology of their period. Eventually, rapidly reloaded fully automatic fire was brought into service in the early days of the metallic cartridge with the Gatling and its French analogue, the mitrailleuse, with the more obscure Gardner following about a decade later. Julien Lucot, writer for the French gun magazine Cibles, sent footage of a reproduction French Reffy (or Reffye) mitrailleuse to Forgotten Weapons, where it was posted for our enjoyment. It is embedded below:

Need a primer on the original manually-cranked Gatling gun? Of course you do, or you know someone who does. The Historical Firearms blog has what you need, with a lengthy post covering in modest detail the operation and history of the gun, from its origins as an improved “coffee mill” gun to its maturation as the premier manually-operated metallic-cartridge firing proto-machine gun: