10 Most Inventive Weapons Used By Historical Societies

4. Organ Gun

This section will take a look at a European weapon. This impressive piece of artillery comes from the late medieval era, around the time the rate at which we were coming up with incredibly impressive means of mass slaughter was really accelerating. Whilst larger powerful cannons were generally used for destroying fortifications and defensive positions in order to provide troops a means of entry. Whilst these were also effective for turning people they hit into meat-jam, they were heavy and not easy to move, manoeuvre or reload, enter the minion and fauconnau. These were smaller, easier to transport weapons designed as anti-personnel guns on which the following entry was based. In a similar fashion to an event that happened in China centuries previously, someone picked up a cannon and said "you know what this gun needs? More gun." Thus I humbly present to you the ribauldequin, or due to its resemblance to a pipe organ, the organ gun. This infernal machine, as it was sometimes known, could rapidly burst a volley of shots. Whilst it wasn't necessarily accurate, it didn't need to be. This was a weapon designed for firing blindly into a crowd. Charging down the barrel of a gun is not an activity for one who doesn't have iron-hard control of their bladder, but charging down the twelve barrels of a gun takes serious gusto. Whilst adding more barrels to the gun isn't, on the surface, the most creative venture ever, making gun barrels was a tricky process to begin with, so making a multiple barrelled weapon that would fire from the touch of a single fuse took some serious engineering. Then making it reasonably portable and adding a variable pitch, wins this a place on the list. That and the fact it is just awesome.