Sir Hiram Maxim: mouse
traps and machine guns
When you think of Camden's Hatton Garden,
you think of diamonds and jewellery. But the street has another
distinction. In the 1880's prolific American inventor Sir
Hiram Maxim designed and built the first machine guns there,
fearsome new weapons that could fire three hundred rounds
and more per minute. Less earth-shatteringly, Sir Hiram is
also credited with inventing an automatic re-setting mouse
trap.
Sir Hiram was born in 1840 in Sangerville,
Maine and is said to have had a penchant for all things mechanical
even as a child. He worked as a carriage builder, a mechanical
draftsman and an instrument-maker then rose to be the Chief
Engineer of the First Electric Lighting Company. His inventions
included a curling iron, devices to prevent the rolling of
ships, eyelet and riveting machines, bombs for aircraft, smokeless
powder, an aerial torpedo gun, and a coffee substitute.
He moved to London in 1881, employed by the
United States Electric Lighting Company. In the same year
he went to the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition where he was
awarded the Legion d'Honneur. An apocryphal story has it that
he met a man at the Exhibition who told him that a quick and
easy way to make money would be to invent a machine that allowed
the Europeans to kill each other in large numbers.
The first machine gun was developed at a small
factory at the end of Hatton Garden, now called Kovacs House
- there you can see the blue plaque, pictured left. Maxim
refined a single-barrelled gun which could fire anything between
300 and 500 rounds per minute, depending on which authority
on the subject you trust. The photograph above shows a demonstration
of the gun with Sir Hiram in the centre wearing a top hat.
The defining characteristic of the gun was
that the recoil force of each shot was used to eject the spent
cartridge and load the next one. This is the same principle
that modern automatic and semi-automatic weapons work depend
on. The enterprise rapidly outgrew the Hatton Garden premises
and Maxim moved the operation to Crayford in 1884.
The British Army adopted the Maxim machine
gun in 1889 and it had its first serious taste of action in
the 1893 Matabele War in what is now Zimbabwe. In one battle,
fifty soldiers were able to defeat 5,000 Matabele warriors
with four of Maxim's guns. Other military powers quickly saw
the value of this indutrialisation of war and the gun, or
guns based on Maxim's original, was soon in service throughout
the world.
Since Maxim died in 1916, he was not to see
the terrible carnage that marked the 1914-18 World War in
which untold thousands died under fire from the by then commonplace
machine gun.
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