Hiram Maxim: Losing to Edison, a Steam Flying Machine and a Blackpool Ride

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Hiram Maxim was born in Maine in 1840 to a family of French Huguenot descent. He was an apprentice coach builder at 14, later worked at his uncle's machine works in Massachusetts, and moved into instrument making and drafting. His early inventions included a device for demagnetizing watches and an automatic fire sprinkler whose heat-triggered valve also telegraphed the fire station, though he found no buyers before the patent expired. In the late 1870s he installed some of the first electric lights in a New York building and co-founded an electric lighting company, then lost the light bulb fight with Thomas Edison: after an employee falsely patented the design, Edison's lawyers had the patent invalidated and manufactured the bulb themselves. In Vienna in 1882 an American acquaintance told him to invent something that would let Europeans cut each other's throats, and Maxim moved to England and built a gun that used its own recoil to fire automatically.

The gun, backed by Edward Vickers, became a mainstay of British arms and was used by several sides in World War I, while years of testing left Maxim profoundly deaf. In 1889 he turned to powered flight, building a three-and-a-half-ton machine with a 110-foot wingspan and two 360-horsepower steam engines, tested on a half-mile track at Bexley. In 1894 it generated enough lift to tear up its restraining rails. In 1904 he built the Captive Flying Machine ride. He became a British citizen in 1899, was knighted by Edward VII in 1901, and died in London in 1916 at 76.

• He advertised in the local paper asking West Norwood neighbors to open their windows during his garden gun tests.
• The Blackpool Pleasure Beach Captive Flying Machine still runs as Europe's oldest operating amusement ride, and Disney engineers studied it in 2001.
• The press called his pine-vapor Pipe of Peace inhaler quack medicine, which he contrasted with the praise his gun earned.
• An atheist, he compiled a 400-page scrapbook for Li Hongzhang critiquing European missionaries in China.
• His son Hiram Percy Maxim invented the firearm silencer, and his will left 4,000 pounds to a Romaine Denison.