page_title: Volley gun
section_title: 19th-century volley guns
hierarchical_section_title: Volley gun / 19th-century volley guns
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Pistolets, musee d'Art et d'Histoire de Neuchatel English: Pistols, musee d'Art et d'Histoire de Neuchatel
context_page_description: A volley gun is a gun with several barrels for firing a number of shots, either simultaneously or in succession. They differ from modern machine guns in that they lack automatic loading and automatic fire and are limited by the number of barrels bundled together.
  In practice, large volley guns were not particularly more useful than a cannon firing canister shot or grapeshot. Since they were still mounted on a carriage, they could be as hard to aim and move around as a cannon, and the many barrels took as long or longer to reload. They also tended to be relatively expensive since they were more complex than a cannon, due to all the barrels and ignition fuses, and each barrel had to be individually maintained and cleaned.
context_section_description: Two notable artillery-sized volley guns were developed in the mid-19th century, although neither was particularly successful in practice. Developed in the 1860s and based on an 1850s design by a captain Fafschamps, the French mitrailleuse is an example of a multi-barreled volley gun that could fire all of its barrels simultaneously or sequentially over a short period of time. Also developed in the 1860s, General Origen Vandenburgh of the New York State Militia designed a weapon that had eighty-five parallel .50 caliber rifle barrels. After failing to sell the weapon to the United Kingdom, he reportedly sold a small number to the Confederate States of America, although there is no record that they were actually used. One Vandenburgh gun was located at Fort Fisher, North Carolina, and another reportedly at Salisbury, NC.
  A few hand-held volley guns were also developed during the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the most distinctive was the "duck's foot" volley gun, a pistol with multiple barrels arranged in a splayed pattern, so that the firer could spray a sizable area with a single shot. The principle behind this type of pistol is one of confrontation by one person against a group; hence, it was popular among bank guards, prison wardens and sea captains in the early 19th century.
  In July 1835, Giuseppe Marco Fieschi used a home-made, 25-barrel volley gun to attempt the assassination of King Louis Philippe I in Paris. He fired the weapon from a third floor window while the king and his entourage were passing in the street below. Although 18 people were killed, the king only received a minor wound. The gun barrels had been sold as scrap by a government arsenal after being labeled as defective and four of them burst when fired. Fieschi was badly injured and was quickly captured. He and two others involved in the plot were condemned to death and guillotined in 1836. His volley gun, known as the Machine infernale, is preserved at the Musée des Archives Nationales in Paris.
caption: Three-barrel tap-action pocket pistol capable of firing all barrels simultaneously or sequentially using a rotating block in the pan.
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