[1] At the age of 21, Gatling created a screw propeller for steamboats, without realizing that one had been patented just months beforehand by John Ericsson.

[2] While living in North Carolina, he worked in the county clerk’s office, taught school briefly, and became a merchant.

[5][6] Later in his life, Gatling patented inventions to improve toilets, bicycles, steam-cleaning of raw wool, pneumatic power, and many other fields.

In his final years, Gatling moved back to St. Louis, Missouri, to form a new company for manufacturing his steam plows, or tractors.

[8] His contributions were commemorated by the U.S. Navy during World War II when the Fletcher Class Destroyer DD-671 was christened the USS Gatling.

In 1877, he wrote, "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine gun which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.

[citation needed] This is partly because Gatling was accused of being a copperhead because of his North Carolina roots, but this was never proven.

[11] Gatling was never affiliated with the Confederate States government or military, nor did he live in the South during the Civil War.

[citation needed] Decades later, the mechanical concept was resurrected and wedded to electrically-driven cranking in the M61 Vulcan.