A TERRIBLE FIREARM.

Grey River Argus, Volume III, Issue 198, 20 April 1867, Page 3

A TERRIBLE FIREARM.

(From the JS T ew York Herald) Tlie Government is now having made at Hartford, Conn., one hundred battery guns of a new invention. Fifty of them will have a one inch bore, and the balance one half-inch bore. This gun is quite a curiosity to look at. The main characteristics of this terrible weapon are that it has a series of barrels, with a carrier and lock cylinder, rigidly fastened to the main shaft, and rotating simultaneously and continuously by means of a crank, the cartridges being fed into the carrier from the feed boxes, thence driven endwise into the re;u % ends of the 1 avrels, then exploded and tlie empty cartridge case withdrawn, without any pause in the operation. The incessant loading and tiring are produced by tlie simplest kind of mechanism, there being less parts about the gun than in the Springfield musket. Tlie gun can be discharged at the rate of two hundred shots per minute. One of its features is no recoil which can affect the accuracy of the aim. When the gun is once sighted at a given object, the same aim can be maintained at the will of the operator until thousands of discharges takes place. A lateral train motion of the gun may be kept up if desired while the gun is being discharged, so that a sheet of balls can be made to sweep a section of any circle within its range. As there is no escape of gas at the breech, all tlie force of the powder is expended in giving velocity to the ball. A consideration which is claimed to be of the very first importance in this gun is that every cartridge must be either discharged or withdrawn from the barrels, thus precluding such results as were shown on the battlefield of Gettysburg, where of the : 28,574 muskets collected after the battle, 24,000 were found to be loaded, 12,000 of them containing two loads each, and 0000 being charged with from three to ten loads each, the cartridges oftentimes being loaded without breaking them, and many inserted with the ball down iirst. The gun is light and easily transported. One of the sizes now being made at the armory discharges 58 100-inch calibre balls, and weighs 225 pounds. The other size discharges balls of one inch calibre (nine ounces in weight), and weighs between 500 and 600 pounds. The lirst named has a range of about one mile, and the latter upwards of two miles.