The Remarkable Hiram Maxims

The Maxim name is well-known in American and European firearms circles. Sir Hiram Maxim and his son, Hiram Percy Maxim, are gun industry giants, though neither initially set out to advance firearm technology. Rather, both men were talented inventors who applied their skills and interests to specific firearms-related endeavors.

It just happened that each of those endeavors became their creators’ most famous and influential inventions.

Hiram Maxim the Inventor

Hiram Stevens Maxim was born to a French Huguenot family in 1840. A native of Sangerville, Maine, Maxim became an apprentice coach builder at age 14. At 24, he moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts to work at his uncle’s machine company. He later worked as an instrument maker and a draftsman. A natural tinkerer, Maxim was reportedly often disappointed by his employees’ lack of ability and industry later in life.

Maxim’s first notable invention was a menthol inhaler for bronchitis patients. He suffered from chronic bronchitis himself and was disappointed when critics called the inhaler “quackery.” Maxim also created the “Pipe of Peace,” a larger steam inhaler that used pine vapor. He claimed it could relieve asthma, hay fever, tinnitus, and catarrh, which is an inflammation of the membranes in the throat or sinuses.

Maxim lamented his critics, saying, “It will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.” Prophetic words, given the invention for which Maxim is best remembered.

Maxim also invented a curling iron, a watch demagnetizer, stabilizing devices for ships, riveting machines, coffee substitutes, and engines running on steam, oil, and gasoline. Maxim also designed the first automatic sprinkler system to fight building fires. He never produced it, but others did when the patent expired. 

Maxim designed and installed electric lights for New York City’s Equitable Life Building in 1878, making it the city’s first office building to be so equipped. Maxim also claimed to have invented the incandescent light bulb, accusing Thomas Edison of stealing his idea by manipulating patent law. 

Hiram Maxim the Gun Maker

Maxim’s most famous, and influential, invention was the Maxim Machine Gun. The inventor said he turned to firearms after an 1882 visit to Vienna, Austria. An unnamed American with whom he was acquainted gave Maxim some advice: “Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.”

Maxim was in Vienna representing the United States Electric Lighting Company, whose London offices he took over in 1881. He stayed in Great Britain and became a naturalized British citizen in 1899. Maxim remembered being knocked down by a rifle’s recoil when he was young, and his thoughts turned to harnessing that energy to operate a firearm.

Between 1883 and 1885, Maxim patented gas, recoil, and blowback firearms. He tested his guns in his garden (that’s what Brits call yards). He thoughtfully placed newspaper announcements warning his neighbors of his tests and suggesting they open their windows to avoid unintentional broken glass. Maxim seems not to have given much thought to hearing protection, as he became mostly deaf later in life from testing his gun designs.

Maxim’s progress drew the attention of British industrialist Edward Vickers. Vickers provided funding, and Maxim went into the firearms business. He merged his company with Swedish gun maker Nordenfelt in 1888, establishing the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Co. Ltd.  The British Army adopted the Maxim Gun in 1889, followed closely by Germany, Russia, Austria, and Italy. 

Vickers bought Maxim’s company in 1897, forming Vickers, Son, & Maxim. The company introduced the Vickers machine gun, an improved Maxim gun, in 1911. The Vickers gun served British and Commonwealth forces through both World Wars, and into the 1960s. Other Maxim variants served on both sides of the world wars, and are still in use today, most recently in Ukraine, along with many Vickers guns. The Maxim family of machine guns is among the most reliable firearms ever built. Maxim resigned from Vickers, Son, & Maxim in 1911, on his 71^st birthday.

Maxim also designed and built the QF 1-Pounder, a 37mm autocannon based on the Maxim machine gun. The gun was known as the “Pom Pom” thanks to its distinctive sound. Maxim patented the gun in the 1880s, and it saw action with British, South African, German, Finnish, and American forces as a light naval and infantry support gun in the Spanish-American War. It reprised that role, while adding antiaircraft responsibilities, in both world wars and the 1939-40 Winter War. It was also used by several South American nations. The 1-pounder Mark 6 version became the US Navy’s first dedicated antiaircraft gun in 1916.

Hiram Maxim the Aeronautical Engineer

Maxim inherited a lifelong interest in powered flight from his father. The senior Maxim had sketched out a helicopter with two counter-rotating rotors. But engine technology was still comparatively primitive, and he couldn’t power it. Hiram Maxim also conceived a helicopter in 1872, but never followed through. He began his first powered flying machine in 1889. Maxim tested airfoil and propellor designs in a wind tunnel and a self-built “whirling arm” test rig. He later developed that test rig into an amusement park ride that is still running today and provided the basis for many modern rides.

Maxim’s test craft was 40 feet long with five wings. The wingspan was 110 feet and the craft weighed 3.5 tons. He powered it with two naphtha-fired 360-horsepower steam engines. Two 17-foot laminated wood propellors provided thrust. Maxim ran the machine along an 1,800-foot section of railroad track he laid at his home. He attached four wheeled outriggers running on an exterior wooden track to keep the craft from lifting more than a few feet during the 1894 trials. The craft did indeed lift off, engaging all the outriggers, but it pulled up their wooden track, forcing Maxim to shut it down.

Maxim never developed his flying machine further, concluding it needed a better power-to-weight ratio to operate properly. It seems he might have beaten the Wright brothers to actual powered flight had he pursued his work.

After leaving Vickers, Maxim started the Grahame-White, Blériot, and Maxim Company to produce scouting and bomber aircraft for the nascent Royal Flying Service. But ill-health forced his retirement before the company could be developed.

Sir Hiram Maxim

Maxim was granted 122 United States patents and 149 British patents. The Maxim gun remains his signature invention, but others were also significant, especially if the light bulb story is true.

Queen Victoria knighted Maxim in 1901 for his contributions to science, though she died before his investiture. Maxim received his knighthood from his “friend and new king, Edward VII.” He was also a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, a Fellow of the Royal Institution, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. 

Maxim worked as long as he was able, only retiring as his health failed. He passed away on November 24, 1916, at age 76. Maxim is buried in London’s West Norwood Cemetery, along with his wife, Sarah and his grandson, Lt. Colonel Maxim Joubert.

Hiram Percy Maxim

Genius begets genius, and Hiram Percy Maxim was very much like his father. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from MIT at age 17. It was a two-year program at the time, but it’s still impressive. He shared his father’s interest in electricity and worked for electric utility companies in Boston after graduating.

Maxim was soon interested in automobiles, and by 1892 was building his own internal combustion engine. Many early cars were driven by electricity, but Maxim believed gasoline powered engines were the future. He said he was “staggered at the amount of time required to build one small engine.” But he was also intrigued.

Still, his final product left much to be desired. The engine, he wrote, “shook and trembled and rattled and clattered, spat oil, fire, smoke, and smell, and to a person who disliked machinery naturally, and who had been brought up to the elegance and perfection of fine horse carriages, it was revolting.” It seems odd that a mechanical engineer and inventor would dislike machinery.

1895 saw Maxim hired by the Pope Manufacturing Company’s Motor Vehicle Division. He immediately involved himself in auto racing, serving as an umpire in that year’s Chicago Times-Herald race and riding in the Morris and Salom Electrobat II.

Four years later, Maxim drove the winning car, a Pope Columbia, in the first American closed circuit auto race. The Pope Columbia became the Columbia Gasoline Carriage. With Hiram Percy Maxim’s latest internal combustion engine under the hood, the car was among the world’s first gasoline powered production automobiles.

Maxim the Acoustical Engineer

Maxim’s dislike of loud automobile engines led to his interest in muffling their sound. Source material indicates that Maxim immediately grasped how his ideas for car mufflers could be applied to firearms, and the technology was developed simultaneously. 

Despite his love of automobiles, Maxim’s primary focus between 1902 and 1910 or so was a firearm sound muffler, which he patented in 1909 as the “Maxim Silencer.”

Maxim claimed the idea came when observed his bath water swirling into the drain. He wondered whether gases generated by a fired cartridge could be slowed down by forcing them through vortices as they escaped the firearm’s muzzle.

The new product was marketed nationally by the Maxim Silent Firearms Company, claiming that the Silencer “absolutely annuls all of the noise of the report.” It also reduced recoil by two-thirds.

Sonic booms and the sound barrier were yet unknown, but Maxim understood that atmospheric conditions also affected a firearm’s noise level. “The only noise the Silencer does not control is the noise made out in the air beyond the gun by a high velocity bullet in its flight.” Maxim explained that the sound results from the same phenomenon that makes a whip crack. “This noise cannot be avoided when the bullet velocity is high no matter how quiet we make the gun.” Maxim clearly knew about where the speed of sound was in feet per second (1,125), since his company offered 1,100 fps ammo, which he advertised as having “strictly noiseless bullet flight.”

The Maxim Silencer was a big hit, with many considering it rude to use an unsilenced firearm. Maxim’s company was very successful until ignorant politicians, egged on by the police and Justice Department, included suppressors in the 1934 National Firearms Act. 

Maxim himself soon returned to automobiles, applying similar technology to make engines quieter. Those principles were also used for air compressors, air conditioning units, and other machines. Modern muffling techniques are built on Maxim’s pioneering work.

Maxim’s Other Interests

Hiram Percy Maxim shared his father’s enthusiasm for aviation, and owned one of New England’s first aircraft, a glider. Maxim promoted the advantages of reliable air mail service and was the longtime chairman of the Hartford, Connecticut Aviation Commission. He was responsible, in that role, for establishing Brainard Field, Hartford’s first municipal airport.

But Maxim’s greatest love may have been radio, which he discovered in 1909. He quickly learned radiotelegraphic code, and he and his son, Hiram Hamilton Maxim, built one of Hartford’s first radiotelegraph stations. It featured a powerful rotary spark-gap transmitter with “enormous antennas.” Maxim called his rig “Old Betsy.”

Maxim wanted to extend his communications range, so he and the Radio Club of Hartford created the American Radio Relay League in 1914. The League organized amateur radio operators across the country to relay messages across the American continent. Maxim was the League’s first president.

The organization still exists today and is the national membership organization for amateur radio operators. The League’s headquarters radio station is called the Hiram Percy Maxim Memorial Station, with its call sign, W1AW, being Maxims last licensed call letters. “Old Betsy” is displayed at League headquarters.

The Remarkable Hiram Maxim

Hiram Percy Maxim died unexpectedly on February 17, 1936, at age 66. Returning home from a visit to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, he fell ill as his train passed through Colorado. He was taken to the hospital in La Junta, and died the next day from a throat infection. He rests in Hagerstown, Maryland’s Rose Hill Cemetery, in his wife’s family’s plot. His wife, Joesphine Hamilton Maxim, later joined him there.

Sir Hiram Maxim and Hiram Percy Maxim are both best known for their work in firearms technology. Though quite different from one another, each invention was based on harnessing the gas released by a fired cartridge. The Maxim Gun used the gas to cycle its action, allowing for sustained automatic fire. The Maxim Silencer tamed the gas to reduce noise and recoil, creating a more pleasant shooting experience.

But the Maxims were far more than firearms engineers. They were true inventors, each with a wide range of interests that often influenced one another. They grasped concepts and principles, following them to their practical applications. Critics have intimated that Sir Hiram Maxim bears some responsibility for the destruction dealt out by his Maxim gun. But realistically, if Maxim hadn’t invented his machine gun, someone else would have. And Maxim neither set British colonial policy nor drive the nations to war in 1914.

Rather, society benefits from talented people with diverse interests coupled with insatiable curiosity and drive. Sir Hiram Maxim and Hiram Percy Maxim were among the rare individuals with all those characteristics. Both men deserve to be remembered for more than the machine gun and the silencer. They were true giants of the industrial age.