“[It will] make it easier and quicker for these Europeans to cut each others' throats."
Anonymous acquaintance of Hiram Maxim
American inventor Hiram Maxim (1840-1916) would have been much more famous had he won the battle with Thomas Edison over the credit for the invention of the electric light. But his other inventions proved to be just as important, at least in the development of firearms in the late nineteenth century. .
Maxim first introduced the principle of his portable, automatic machine gun in an 1883 patent. Several features of Maxim's gun made it innovative. The action was completely automatic and the user needed only to keep his finger pressed on the trigger to fire the gun. The recoil energy of the shot was used to extract the old shell, reload a new one, and automatically fire. The gun had a single barrel that was surrounded by a jacket filled with water to cool the barrel after it was heated by firing. The gun was lighter and more portable than previous weapons.
The U.S. government wasn't interested in buying Maxim's invention, so he took it to Europe where he was able to market it to both the English and the Germans. Maxim became a British citizen in 1901 and was knighted by Queen Victoria. His company, Vickers, Son, & Maxim, was very successful at marketing the deadly device throughout Europe, especially Germany
The guns were licenced and manufactured by companies in Britain and Germany and the first of the so-called Maxims was delivered to the German navy in 1894. Both sides used Maxim machine guns during World War I. The Maxim guns evolved over the years to become even more effective, and served as the prototypes for today's modern machine guns.
