James Puckle patents the Puckle gun, an early machine gun

On May 15, 1718, London lawyer James Puckle secured British patent number 418 for a hand-cranked, revolving-chamber flintlock that history often calls the world’s first “machine gun.” Mounted on a tripod and fed by a detachable cylinder, the single-barrelled weapon could loose around nine shots a minute—where a trained musketeer managed perhaps three.

Puckle pitched it as an anti-boarding gun for ships. He also designed two cylinders with an eccentric flourish: round bullets for Christian foes and square ones, thought to inflict nastier wounds, for the Ottoman Turks.

Investors were unmoved; one wag noted it harmed mainly those who put money into it.

The unreliable flintlock mechanism doomed it. A 1717 trial at Woolwich went poorly, the army passed, and perhaps only two were ever built. Still, the patent’s detailed mechanical drawings make it a landmark in both firearms and patent history.