that would be. He put the poker back on the burner, left the room, and returned, having hidden the chilled poker in his coat. Everything had been prepared for the maid’s confusion. Maxim lifted the heated poker from the stove again, and suddenly acted as if it were too hot to hold. He waved it about and stepped toward the maid, bringing it close enough for her to see its glow and feel its heat. He backed up. When the maid looked away from her employer’s odd spectacle, he withdrew the cold poker from under his jacket, slapped it against her neck, and gave a shout—“Look out!” Then he hissed, as if she had been seared. The cook screamed, bunched her apron where the poker had touched, and collapsed. Maxim’s wife rushed into the room. The cook shrieked. She thought he had branded her. She shrieked again. Maxim, with his two pokers, was laughing.
After a great amount of effort my mother succeeded in getting the woman’s hand down from her neck, and the surprising fact was disclosed that there was not even a mark visible, which threw my mother into complete confusion. She was very excitable and for some time she and my father and the cook shouted at cross purposes at one another, nobody listening to anybody else and nobody being able to make head or tail of what the others were talking about. My father saw that he must have gone too far, and did his best to explain that it was an experiment he had been conducting, that nobody had been hurt, and that it was all very funny if only the others would see it in that light; and besides, things had come to a pretty pass if a man could not experiment in his own house.12
The cook quit on the spot.
This is the man who would give the world automatic weapons, those most efficient killing tools. Not surprisingly, disputes followed Maxim wherever he went. One of his brothers loathed him so much that there was talk in London of arranging a duel. His son, or rather, the one son he acknowledged in public, labeled him a bad father. Maxim weathered court cases that accused him of misdeeds ranging from patent infringement to trigamy. He was accused of having evaded Civil War service, an embarrassing charge for an arms designer and salesman. (The history is unclear here and the dispute remains unsettled. Maxim claimed that because two of his brothers served, he, as the last remaining son, was exempt. But available census records in Maine show that Maxim had more than two brothers, and one, Leander, who was four years old in 1850, would have been too young to serve as the war began and Maxim decamped for Quebec. This does not prove that Hiram evaded military service, but it suggests that his explanations for not serving, aside from seeing military service as beneath him, do not square with facts.)13 Later, after his automatic weapons were in mass production, he quarreled with Alfred Nobel, just as Richard Gatling had. Maxim and Nobel both claimed to have been the first to patent smokeless gunpowder, which, as it allowed gunners to remain concealed when they fired upon an enemy from a distance, became an essential military product after it was introduced. (British courts ruled that Maxim had settled upon the chemical formula first.)
For all of the arguments and struggles that surrounded him, no credible counterclaim about the invention of the automatic weapon ever emerged. The claim was Hiram Maxim’s alone, and he cherished it.
This is not to say that Hiram Maxim necessarily told the truth.
Maxim gave different accounts about the origins of his interest in automatic weapons. In the more commonly cited account, machine-gun design became his personal project while he was on assignment in Europe. His employer, the United States Electric Lighting Company, had transferred him to an affiliate in London but asked him first to visit Paris and Brussels. There he was to undertake the tedious task of reviewing copies of European patents related to electricity. The work required many months. At an industry exposition in Vienna, Maxim met an American who offered bizarre advice. The electric business was getting crowded; the man recommended that the inventor open another line of work. “Maxim, hang your electrical machines!” he said. “If you wish to make your everlasting fortune and pile up gold by the ton, invent a killing machine, something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility—that is what they want.” In another account, he identified the American who made the suggestion as a “Jew” he knew previously from the United States.14
Whether the account is true remains anyone’s guess. Maxim was comfortable with embellishment, and in published accounts of the exchange he did not share the other man’s name. He did say that the man was not serious. That did not matter. Maxim was serious enough.
At the time, all of the weapons sold in the machine-gun class were manually operated. The Gardner, the Gatling, the Nordenfelt—with each of these weapons, continuous fire was realized by continuous turning of a hand crank or movement of a mechanical arm. The effect was like that of a manual pump. As long as the gunner’s arm kept cranking, and cartridges were in the feed system, bullets would be fired. If the gunner’s arm stopped working, so did everything else. By 1884, these technologies were mature, well machined, and impressive for what they were. Maxim had a different approach. He had fired a rifle before, and felt its kick. The recoil was enough to bruise a shoulder. It was also evidence of wasted energy: Only a portion of the powder’s energy was used to force a bullet down the barrel and out the muzzle. Could not some of this unused energy be harnessed, cartridge by cartridge, blast by blast, to do the tasks performed by the crank?
Returning to Paris, Maxim sketched out the concept of the automatic rifle, modeling an early draft on an existing pattern: the Winchester rifle.15 He was too busy to pursue it. His assignment to review patents on the Continent was ending, and he had commitments awaiting him in England. Maxim had been told that the electrical office there would pay half his salary, with the balance underwritten by the American firm. He arrived in London and found the lighting concern’s director unwilling to disburse the wages. Maxim asked the director how much he would be willing to pay. The director replied, “One guinea a year.” Hiram Maxim and electricity were all but done. He remembered his Paris drawings and the idea of harnessing recoil to make an automatic gun. “It occurred to me,” he said, “that this would be a very good opportunity for me to commence experiments.”16
Over the years Maxim offered a range of stories about when he first undertook such work. He told one interviewer that he made his first designs in 1873, but did not have time to test them for a decade.17 In a third version, he said his interest reached to 1854 when his father conceived of a hand-cranked, single-barrel machine gun. He hoped it would fire one hundred rounds a minute. Maxim would have been fourteen years old then; he claimed he made drawings and models of his father’s ideas over the next two years at the family wood shop in Maine. His uncle, who owned a metal works in Massachusetts, examined the plans and announced they would cost one hundred dollars to manufacture but not be worth one hundred cents.18 The three accounts are not mutually exclusive, though the third description, if true, would have placed Maxim’s involvement in hand- powered machine guns neatly ahead of Richard Gatling’s. Maxim liked to be first.
Whether Maxim was a reliable correspondent on matters related to the development of the Maxim gun is another question. Ian V. Hogg, one of the most objective researchers of firearms and their origins, suggested that Maxim did not act nearly as independently as he made it seem. Citing records of the 1880s from the British military’s director of artillery, Hogg wrote that the first time the British military heard of the Maxim gun, word of the weapon came from Albert Vickers of Vickers, Sons & Company, a metallurgical concern. In September 1884, it seemed, Mr. Vickers told the British military that he had “several machine guns ready for inspection” and identified himself as “one of the part owners of the patents.” Within a week, the British military had decided to provide cartridges for demonstration trials, and by early October the superintendent of the Royal Small Arms Factory had visited Maxim’s workshop. A demonstration shooting was held in late January 1885 for several British military officials, who were impressed. From the records, Hogg deduced that Maxim had entered an early partnership with Vickers, and perhaps had his financial backing.19 The available records also show that by early November 1884, the Maxim Gun Company had incorporated, and that Albert Vickers and Robert R. Symon each had 417 shares with an initial value of twenty pounds each. Maxim was a minority shareholder, with 416 shares.20
Whatever the precise nature of his earliest backing, two things are clear. First, Maxim had more support— financial, technical, and social, the third being important to penetrate the business world in a foreign country—than he publicly acknowledged. Second, as Maxim turned his attention to firearms full-time in London, he was well placed to open a new business. He was in his early forties and had experience in manufacturing, engineering, design, sales, and patents. He had made ample money in the early utility industries, and he possessed a rich mix of theoretical and practical skills. He opened an experimental workshop in Hatton Garden, hired assistants, and worked out his drawings. He focused on the guts of an automatic weapon, wasting no time on elements already well-known. The
