Hiram Maxim was a designer with a story, and an ego, like almost no other. He was born in 1840 on a small farm in central Maine, an isolated and impoverished region. By his own long and often unverifiable account of his life, his excellence had begun with birth. “For many years there has been a tradition that there was always one very strong member in the Maxim family,” he said. “And I think I am entitled to be recognized as the strong member of the generation in which I was born.” His attraction to labor started early, as did his sense of mischief. At the age of eight, he said, he felled a gigantic fir tree with a butcher’s knife, chipping at a groove around its base all day for a week. The tree toppled and fell. The little Maxim watched with awe. A farmer soon complained to him that he had robbed his cows of their pasture’s only shade. Maxim was unmoved. “This was the proudest moment of my long and eventful life,” he wrote shortly before he died. “Nothing since has equaled it.” After he became famous in Europe he was remembered back in Maine as “the worst boy for miles around.”3
His confidence, which veered into arrogance, was beyond measure. By the time he was a teenager, Maxim considered himself an “expert in geography” and “a natural all-round mechanic.” He claimed to be so handy that he could do all the work of the experienced craftsmen in the workshops of Maine, and in less time. And he was growing into the strongest man in town. Accounts of his strength were Bunyanesque. As a young man, he singlehandedly moved a row of enormous pork barrels from a sled, lifting barrel after barrel. Each barrel, he said, weighed six hundred pounds. His strength became such a curiosity that townsmen urged him to fight, examining him the way a buyer examines a horse. “All agreed that I had the make-up of a successful boxer,” he wrote. “I had already thought of taking up the art, feeling convinced that I could very soon become a champion.”4 The local men arranged a match on Independence Day between Maxim and the town’s best boxer. Within minutes, he had beaten the reigning champion senseless and was fighting the next-most-feared man. Maxim claimed he punched his second opponent into unconsciousness, too.
Maxim and his son’s memoirs are busy with accounts of fights. Between descriptions of his inventions and his travels, they are an inventory of brawls and beatings worthy of a Victorian-era comic hero, invincible but reluctant, who always defeats those who provoked his peaceful genius to feats of strength. In one episode Maxim laughed into the face of a man who menaced him with a pistol. In another he hoisted a robber who tried to waylay him. Maxim casually tossed the criminal over a fence. He insisted fighting was a distraction that was beneath him, yet he reveled in telling of it smugly, and saw himself as the best man at it he ever met.
Maxim never attended university. But he educated himself by reading scientific literature and books, from which he taught himself chemistry, physics, and mathematics—complements to the tool-handling and design skills he was learning in his father’s shop. His mind was undistracted by most vices: at the end of his life, he claimed never once to have smoked tobacco, tasted alcohol, or consumed caffeine. (Women were another matter. He was hounded with allegations of deceiving and abandoning women as he moved in search of work. As he neared the age of sixty, three different women claimed to have been married to him—at the same time. In the end, he left three separate families.)5 He held himself above the common man and ordinary pursuits. While he was at the mill in Maine, the Civil War began. The young men organized into a company, which marched on the streets. Maxim briefly joined them, but he loathed the marching and found the military mentality of his peers grating (he later compared them to the Boy Scouts). Contemptuous of soldiering, he returned to the mill. A local doctor told him he had made the right decision. Military service, by Maxim’s account, was beneath a man of Maxim’s gifts.
He thought that I was altogether the most promising young man in Dexter; that I was a very hard worker, without any bad habits; that it might be all right for those less gifted than myself to go to the war, but it was my duty to stay at home and work; also that I would find soldiering a very hard job indeed. So I made up my mind to give it up and refused to go on.6
Early in the war, Maxim left the United States for Huntingdon, Quebec, and he found jobs as a mill worker, sign painter, and briefly as bartender at a small hotel, where he delighted in serving diluted whiskey to customers and in watching the patrons fight.7 Next he moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and took a position in an uncle’s metal works, learning the machinist’s trade. Later he became a draftsman in Boston, making precision drawings of gas machines. He was collecting modern skills, and an insider’s knowledge and appreciation of business and of leading industries of the day. “I left no stone unturned,” he said, “to become expert at everything I had to do.”8
When he was not engaged by his bosses, he was inventing products and widgets of every sort. He had begun tinkering as a boy. As a teenager, he designed a mousetrap that reset itself automatically. From then on, he said, he was “a chronic inventor.” And so it went: first mousetraps, then tricycle wheels and silicate blackboard for a schoolhouse, later pumps and guns and curling irons and an early model airplane. He moved to Brooklyn for a machinist’s job at the Novelty Iron Works, and made his home near Carroll Park.9 He opened a side business as a gas fitter and then invented a gas-distributing machine. Its promise enabled him to form a company with an office on Broadway, across from City Hall, that manufactured and installed his gas-distributing machines in buildings, bringing them a new means of having light and heat. His inventing continued, to his success and dismay. After Maxim claimed to have beaten Edison in the race to design the electric light, Edison’s fame and wealth filled him with jealousy and pique. When he displayed his own lamp, and people asked him if it was Edison’s, he grew angry enough that he told a business partner that “the next time anyone said, ‘Is it Edison’s?’ I would kill him on the spot.” He nearly had the chance. One day, while Maxim was traveling, a New Jersey farmer saw him carrying a lamp.
He sat down on the opposite side of the ferry-boat and stared at me. Finally, he came over and said, “Excuse me sir, but what is that ’ere machine—what is it for?” I looked at the fellow and made up my mind that he had a wife and family at home, so I replied, “It is only a sausage stuffer,” and thus saved the poor fellow’s life.10
Practical jokes and Maxim went together. Some of his antics were little more than mischief. In Brooklyn, he enlisted the help of his young son, Hiram Percy, to harry a police officer who was paying Sunday visits to a housemaid who worked for a family across the street. The officer and the maid met behind an entryway gate. Maxim was suspicious. He told his son that the two of them were “sparking” over there, and that this would have to stop. “If they spark on Sundays, how do we know that they will not spark on other days,” he said. “We cannot have this policeman spending his time sparking when he should be watching for bad people.” He unfolded his plans before the boy. When the policeman returned the following Sunday, hidden in the umbrella basket of the Maxims’ home was a long brass tube, similar to a blowgun, which Maxim had made. Maxim took a position behind the curtain of an open window, loaded a dried white bean into the pipe, aimed, and expelled the little missile high into the air, banking it off the upper facade of a three-story building directly above the suspected dalliance. After a half- dozen shots, the policeman stepped from behind the gate and looked up at the windows of the three-story building. He thought someone was dropping beans from above. Seeing no one, the officer returned to the pleasures behind the gate. The bean blower opened fire anew. The officer reappeared and walked about the sidewalk purposefully, staring at the windows with his back to Maxim’s window. The police officer saw nothing and went back to his business with the maid. Maxim fired a third time. As the officer ran out the gate, Maxim was “rolling around in gales of merriment.”11
Maxim’s foxing of the police officer and the maid was tricky, and it had risks. But it was not cruel. His household staff suffered worse. Maxim churned through employees and was frequently annoyed “by the stupidity of the average cook or housemaid.” He gave them nicknames, including a series of people he assigned the name Stupid. “I remember Stupid the Fifth very distinctly,” his son recalled. “I thought this was her real name.” Maxim had read an item claiming that the skin perceives contact with very cold objects and very hot objects in the same way. One weekend at their home, he decided to test the theory on one of the Stupids, an Irish woman in his employ. He heated a metal poker above an oven grate until it glowed red and placed a duplicate poker in a container of alcohol and snow, chilling it to a temperature below freezing. As his intended victim worked nearby, he paced about the kitchen with the glowing poker, testing it on firewood, which produced smoke. In a voice the maid could not miss, he told his son that such irons were used to burn brands into the necks of cattle, and how painful
