The Man
When it comes to the first generation or two of machine guns, the common name most American shooters and old soldiers think of is the Maestro, John Moses Browning, who produced several great .30 and .50 caliber machine guns, including the seemingly-immortal M2 .50 caliber, the best heavy machine gun ever made.
Before Browning, though, there were others. Most are familiar with the earlier attempts at the Gatling multi-barreled guns, volley guns, and so on. But one of the first machine guns as we know them now, with one barrel fed by a magazine or belt, was built by an American expat in Britain. His name? Hiram Stevens Maxim.
Maxim was a prolific inventor. He held patents for hair-curling irons, mousetraps, and steam pumps. He claimed to have invented the light bulb, but that was just talk. He messed about with powered aircraft, but there he failed.
Born in 1840, Hiram Maxim spent his early years in Maine. He took on an apprenticeship in coachbuilding at 14, and then at 24 went to work for his uncle. He worked at various trades while working on his various inventions. In 1881, he was working for the United States Electric Lighting Company, which sent him to the United Kingdom to reorganize its London offices. He eventually settled in the UK and in 1899, became a naturalized British subject, even receiving a knighthood.
He is best-known, though, for his machine gun.
The Guns
In 1884, Hiram Maxim made his breakthrough. The Maxim gun, a belt-fed, water-cooled, recoil-operated machine gun, was the first fully automatic, single-barreled machine gun made anywhere. It was used in both world wars and was a major influence in the designs of succeeding machine guns, including the British Vickers gun, the German MG 08, and the Russian Pulyemyot Maksima M1910, which is still in use to this day in limited numbers in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Its operation was relatively simple: Recoil from a fired cartridge pushed the breech block back, ejecting the empty case and returning with a live one. It was a simple and effective design, and ended up being used all over the world. Being water-cooled, it could sustain its 600 rounds-per-minute rate of fire for an extended period, but it was heavy and cumbersome; while one man could fire it, it took several to keep it running. This was a crew-served weapon in its purest form.
Maxim founded the Maxim Gun Company in 1884, with help from the Vickers steel empire. In time, the Maxim company was absorbed by the Vickers conglomerate, leading the gun to be reworked and dubbed the Vickers-Maxim gun, which led to the Vickers machine gun.
Maxim’s gun was used in colonial scraps around the world and proved tough and reliable. It was in 1914, though, that the Maxim Gun really proved its worth.
The Great War
The First World War was a clash of nations, but it was also a clash of technologies. Most of the aggressors went into the battle carrying a lot of 19th-century notions, which fell apart in the face of 20th-century technologies. The machine gun was one of those new technologies, and Maxim’s gun was well represented by both sides. The Allied powers used the French Hotchkiss M1914 machine gun, and the British had the Lewis Gun, but the Maxim seemed to be the only one found on both sides of an engagement on the same day.
Read More: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XXXVIII - The Browning Automatic Rifle
Remember what I said about the clash of technologies? The Napoleonic charge was still a thing early in the Great War, where one side, early in the war, many armies still wore brightly colored uniforms in the field, would line up and charge en masse, running for the enemy positions with fixed bayonets. That was bad enough in the face of repeating rifles. When the machine gun was added to the mix, those old-fashioned charges became a massacre. Add modern breechloading artillery, fired over open sights, and what you had was a slaughter. And until 1918, when the Maestro stepped in and provided the Allies with the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, the charging infantry could not respond in kind, as the old water-cooled machine guns were heavy to take along on an advance. When on the attack, both sides just had to hope they had enough numbers in the charge to see some of them through to the enemy trenches.
Between the machine gun, the airplane, chemical weapons, radio communications, tanks, and armored cars, the face of war was changed forever, and Hiram Maxim’s gun was one of the drivers of that change.
He very nearly produced one of the others as well.
His Flying Machine
Yes, he tried to make an airplane. There was just one problem: It didn’t work. Maxim's “flying machine” was a giant for the time. When he started building his airplane in 1884, it was a 40-foot-long, 110-foot-wingspan beast that weighed 3 ½ tons. It was to be powered by two 360-horsepower, naptha-fueled steam engines driving two propellers.
Maxim, in this effort, was foiled by the same problem that vexed airplane designers until the Wright Brothers adopted a lightweight, gasoline-powered engine: Insufficient power-to-weight ratio. Maxim’s machine, to put it bluntly, never got off the ground. Maxim later turned his aircraft design efforts into “captive flying machines,” or as we would call them, amusement park rides.
His Legacy
Hiram Maxim died in his London home in late 1916, at the age of 76. He lived long enough to see his invention change the face of warfare, one of a number of inventions to do so. And, in one of history’s little ironies, the one device Maxim was unsuccessful with became the other major item to change the face of war in the Great War – the airplane.
The inventing streak didn’t stop with old Hiram, either. His son, Hiram Percy Maxim, invented the Maxim Silencer, one of the first effective firearms suppressors, which was used by no less than the American President Theodore Roosevelt.
Read More: Sunday Gun Day Vol. III Ep. XXXV - Teddy Roosevelt's Maxim-Silenced Rifles
Maxim’s machine gun stayed in use around the world for a long time. The Maxim and other machine guns, in the Great War, changed a lot of the old world’s assumptions and tactics. And, in time, other inventions, other tactics, developed to counter them. His legacy remains, though, a remarkable one: A prolific inventor who gave the world one of the first and, at the time, best of what would become the modern machine gun.
