First Freedom by David Harsanyi

Author:David Harsanyi [Harsanyi, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501174025
Publisher: Threshold Editions
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

AN AMERICAN IN LONDON

“Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.”

—Hilaire Belloc

Sir Hiram Maxim

Many years after he was already wealthy and famous, Hiram Maxim, who suffered from bronchitis his whole life, invented the first steam inhaler to mitigate his suffering. One of his critics soon accused him of wasting his time and “prostituting” his talents on “quack” devices for the sick. “From the foregoing it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine,” Maxim sarcastically retorted, “and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”1

The fact was that the American would one day be knighted by Queen Victoria, and it wasn’t because he had helped people breathe easier. Maxim invented guns that did more than simply introduce automatic rapid fire to the battlefields of Europe. They decimated long-standing notions about courage and ingenuity and changed the contours of warfare forever. Men, no matter how brave or resourceful or talented with a gun, could now be mowed down by a contraption that took little skill or bravery to use.

In 1871, the New York Times published an editorial informing its readers of a new creation, one that it referred to as a “terrible automatic engine of war.” Rather than lament the power of Maxim’s new automatic weapons, the newspaper remarked that such an easy-to-use, perpetually killing machine would almost certainly impel world leaders to end their disputes through diplomacy rather than violent conflict.2 “Machine guns and automatic weapons are the highest types of firearms that have been invented,” the unnamed author of the editorial notes, “and indeed it seems impossible to imagine anything more likely than they to bring about a general state of peace among all nations.”

It would not. Although there is no way to properly quantify just how many people Maxim’s inventions would leave dead or mutilated on the muddy battlefields of Europe over the next fifty years, Edward C. Ezell, curator of armed forces history at the Smithsonian Institution, once speculated that the “numbers must be astronomical.”3 And whereas Gatling, like other gunmakers of the nineteenth century, claimed his invention was conceived for humanitarian reasons, Hiram Maxim offered no such moral justifications. In fact, years later he recalled that the reason he’d gotten into the gun trade in the first place was because an American expat had told him figuring out ways to allow European nations to kill each other was the fastest way to get rich. He was right.

Born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine, Maxim described himself as a “chronic inventor.”4 He probably deserves to be considered one of the greatest this country has ever produced. By the age of fourteen he was apprenticing to a carriage maker, and by the age of twenty-six he obtained the first of his 271 patents in the United States. Maxim’s inventions were as imaginative as they were wide-ranging. His earliest biographer describes his impressive list of patents as “multifarious devices” that would lie on a

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