The Gorgas machine gun (or sometimes just a Gorgas gun) was a manually cranked prototype machine gun, the creation of Confederate States general Josiah Gorgas. It had a single 1.25 inches caliber smooth-bore barrel. The barrel was fed from a revolver-like ring, but with an axis of rotation perpendicular to the bore, rather than the usual revolver configuration with parallel axes. The cylinder housed 18 copper-lined chambers that were muzzle loaded from the outer side of the ring. The interior side of the multiple-chamber ring was lined with the corresponding 18 percussion cap nipples. The ring was rotated by a hand lever. The gun had a cast iron receiver.