This past summer I got a burr under my saddle about the lying hoplophobes who claim that the crafters of the Second Amendment couldn't have conceived of anything as advanced as a rapid-fire rifle so 2A shouldn't apply to them. So I posted about firearm developments before the outbreak of the American Revolution (some dating back to the early second millenia AD) and that the Founding Fathers would have been aware of that make it abundantly clear that all the way back to the earliest weapons involving a gunpowder-propelled projectile, man has lusted after a rapidly-firing gun of a sort that in the modern parlance is called a "machine gun."
Also in that post I mentioned that the earliest rudimentary repeating firearm I was aware of was the Danish-make Kalthoff repeater (of ca. 1630). Today I accidentally stumbled on one I'd never heard of before, made roughly half a century before the Kalthoff, and that comes closer to delivering on the "machine gun's" rate of fire than anything that would come along for the next 250 years.
This is a German-made 67-caliber rifle from 1580-90 with two wheellocks (designer unknown). The reason for two wheellocks was that 16 balls and charges could be loaded, superposed, like in a roman candle (or the 18th Century Belton flintlock, or the 21st Century Metal Storm family of weapons).
It fired lead balls that had what effectively was a "touch hole" running through them lengthwise. The hole was stuffed with gunpowder and the forward-mounted wheel lock would spark to light the powder on the muzzle side of the uppermost ball. The fire would travel down the powder-filled hole in the ball and light the charge behind it, which both fired that uppermost ball and "lit the fuse" on the ball just behind it, establishing a chain reaction.
Details are sketchy but the forward wheel lock is supposed to be used to fire the first 10 balls (or nine, accounts vary), and the rear wheel lock fired the remaining six (or seven). So they all go off in succession, one after the other, just as fast as the powder can burn the length of the hole. I find no detail offering what interrupts the firing so the latter rounds can be fired separately but it could have been as simple as loading a ball without a powder-filled hole. In which case you potentially could fire all 16 in one pull of the trigger.
And in case you're wondering, the powder-filled orifice in the balls remains in-line with the bore (where the fire can be passed one ball to the next most effectively) because both the bore and the balls are ovalized. So the balls would only fit in the bore in one orientation.
Nothing I have yet found addresses whether the oval bore is straight or spiraling, which would impart spin on the ball in lieu of rifling, but Charles Lancaster is credited with inventing the spiralling oval "Lancaster" bore in about 1850, so I'm guessing it's straight.
So this in essence is a 15th-Century machine gun with a rather small magazine capacity (which should make Nutty Pelosilly deliriously happy). Admittedly not a very practical weapon but it shows the incredible energy the earlier firearm inventors applied to the problem of creating a machine gun when both fixed (one-piece) ammunition and the percussion cap/primer had yet to be invented. Created a full two centuries before the US Constitution.
As I keep saying, anyone who states that the Founding Fathers could not have envisioned anything along the lines of the modern high-volume-of-fire military rifle either is a liar or is ignorant of history. Or both.
Some big cheese at the NRA holding an example of the rifle (very large, shows entire rifle in good detail if you embiggen)
It looks like he's holding some crazy variant of a saxophone.
And a very informative video:
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