Anglo-American engineer and inventor, born at Sangerville, ME, on the 5th of February 1840. After serving an apprenticeship with a coachbuilder, he entered the machine works of his uncle, Levi Stevens, at Fitchburg, MA, in 1864, and four years later he became a draughtsman in the Novelty Iron Works and Shipbuilding Company in New York City. About this period he produced several inventions connected with illumination by gas; and from 1877 he was one of the numerous inventors who were trying to solve the problem of making an efficient and durable incandescent electric lamp, in this connection introducing the widely used process of treating the carbon filaments by heating them in an atmosphere of hydrocarbon vapour. In 1880 he came to Europe, and soon began to devote himself to the construction of a machine-gun which should be automatically loaded and fired by the energy of the recoil. In order to realize the full usefulness of the weapon, which was first exhibited in an underground range at Hatton Garden, London, in 1884, he felt the necessity of employing a smokeless powder, and accordingly he devised maximite, a mixture of trinitrocellulose, nitroglycerine and castor oil, which was patented in 1889. He also undertook to make a flying machine, and after numerous preliminary experiments constructed an apparatus which was tried at Bexley Heath, Kent, in 1894. Having been naturalized as a British subject, he was knighted in 1901. He died in London on the 24th of November 1916.
His younger brother, Hudson Maxim (1853–1927), was born on the 3rd of February 1853 and educated at the Maine Wesleyan Seminary at Kent’s Hill, ME. He began life in a printing and publishing business, but in 1888 took up the ordnance and explosives work in which his brother was interested, and invented a smokeless powder called “maximite,” the formula of which he sold to the U.S. Government in 1901. He afterwards produced “stabillite,” another smokeless powder, as well as “motorite,” a self-combustive material for driving automobile torpedoes, and a special form of torpedo-ram. In September 1915 he was made a member of the Naval Consulting Board. He published The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language (1910); Defenseless America (1915) and Dynamite Stories (1916).
