Sir Hiram Maxim.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVI, Issue 8, 23 August 1911, Page 2

Sir Hiram Maxim.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A VETERAN INVENTOR.

The fact that the fulloicitig sketch of has career teas icrittcn by himself icill lend particular interest to this biography of Sir Hiriim. — Ed.

ZqV 1R HIRAM MAXIM is of Puritan parentage, and was born in Sangerville, Me., February sth, 1840. He was educated at the common schools, and at the age of IB commenced to serve an apprenticeship as a carriage maker at Abbott, Me., working in the summer time and going to school in the winter, up to the age of 20. Here he made a tricycle with bicycle wheels of the present type. These are believed to be the first wheel* ever made in America in which the hub was suspended by spokes in tension. During the civil war he was employed at the engineering works of his uncle at Fitchburg, Mass., where he worked

first as a machinist, then as a brass finisher, and finally as a draughtsman. During the last year of the war he left Fitchburg and went to Boston, where he entered the employ of Oliver P. Drake as a draughtsman. Drake was a very clever philosophical instrument maker, and also a builder of automatic gas machines. While at Boston, Maxim invented many different forms of gas machines. From Boston he went to New York, where he was employed as a draughtsman at the Novelty Iron Works. At that time this firm had in hand the building of the Pacific Mail steamers. It had been said by those who pretended to know that there was no possible way of making a machine for cai b bureting air for illuminating purposes, which would produce a mixture of a uniform density, but Sir Hiram discovered no less than three separate systems of accomplishing this. I si ter on. Sir Hiram took up the subject of electricity, made many inventions, and took out many patents. He made all the apparatus and put up the first illuminated fountains at Saratoga Spring*, N.Y. He was the true inventor

of the system of flashing which made incandescent lighting possible, that is, ha discovered a proeess of building up and standardising the filaments of electric light by heating them electrically in highly attenuated atmosphere of hydrocarbon gases. He discovered a new process of making phosphoric anhydride, reducing the cost from 20/ to 2; 1 per pound. He made the first regulator for keeping the pressure constant in an electric lighting system quite independently of the number of lights on the circuit. This apparatus was exhibited in Paris in 1881. and Sir Hiram was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. -In 1883 he left France and went to London, and commenced work on an

automatic gun. I’p to that time, no on# had ever attempted to make an automatic gun. The first gun made was operated by the backward movement of the cartridge in the barrel at the instant of firing, a system which is largely used in automatic pistols at the present dajj But this system would not work with the long bottle-neck military cartridge, sd the next gun made worked by the recoil of the barrel and breech block, that is when the gun was fired it» allowed to recoil one inch, and the energy thus developed performed all thO functions of bringing the cartridge int<* position, transferring them from the bdC into the barrel, firing them, extracting the empty cases, expelling them, coking the hammer and bringing the new cartridge into position. When it was announced in the newspapers that an American engineer bn* a little workshop in Hatton Garden. I don. had made a machine gun that woU ' actually load and fire itself, at the ra of GOO roumls in the minute, from derived from the burning |M>wder. public were incredulous; H waR * ..4

fether too good to be true. But the little gun was very much in evidence, and everyone came to see it, from the I'rincc of Wales down. Cher 200,000 rounds of fully loaded military cartridges were used in showing the guu to visitors. I'liis invention put Sir Hiram in the first rank of seientitie men. ft was thought that as he had solved such a difficult problem that he might solve others. At that time the British Government was about to pay a very large sum of money for the secret of the German slow burning powder. Many of the scientific men of London had analysed the German powder, and found that it contained no new element; they could make an exact imitation of it. but the German powder produced low pressures and high velocities, and the English imitation produced high pressures and low velocities. Everyone had attempted to find out the secret by chemical means, but Sir Hiram attacked it with his microscope and found that the German powder was slow burning because the crystals of nitre, although small, were many hundreds of times greater than in the English powder. The mystery was solved and tlie money saved. ''ir Hiram followed this up by making a hundred different kinds of powder in a single day, all of different degrees of slow burning. The sulphur and charcoal were put in the mill and thoroughly ground and incorporated; the nitre was then added and specimens taken out as the process advanced. The first specimens were very slow and the last extrentelv violent. Tit is led to a great number of other experiments with powder. At the beginning of 1885 many ollicials expressed their opinion that the Whitehead torpedo could not be relied upon in a heavy sea, and Sir Hiram was requested to design a very large gun for throwing aerial torpedoes through the air instead of propelling them through the water. On May 30th, 1885, he patented the gun desired and proceeded to make one. The projectile was provided with a delayed action fuse working on the same pian as the best fuses of today. The experiments with this large gun led to the manufacture of the first cordite, and curiously enough this cordite hid the exact diameter and appearance of the British cordite that was made some years later. Chemically, it dill-red but slightly from the ballistite of Nobel. In the early spring of 1888 Sir Hiram was requested bv some high British ollicials to turn his attention to the manufacture of a smokeless powder, and experiments were conducted through the summer which led to patents being taken November Sth. 1888. This was followed by many other patents on various kinds of smokeless powder. When the French were boasting of a very remarkable explosive that they bad discovered and which could be shot through armour plate without exploding from the shot. Sir Hiram set to work, and very soon discovered that this much boasted explosive was a modified form of picric acid. He made it in England, and it is practically the same as what is known as dunnit in the United States at the.present time. When a gun was required for firing on torp do boats Me-srs Armstrong made a gun that could be fired by four men about ten rounds in a minute. It was a verv clumsy- affair. Hotchkiss made a much better gun. which four men were abb- to fine nearly twenty rounds in a minute, and this was followed up by N -r-i. nfeldt. who produced an extremely i,c it and Irandy gun that four men snc- <. i-.i in tiling twenty-five rounds in a minute. All of these guns gave a very sc. ie -a<<k to the gunner, anil an attempt was made to prevent them from u . : ing at all. The next gun to make ,i ,i rame was sir Hiram Maxim’s. '1 is j-.m was provided with a much im- • ved system of mounting which did i _ive the gunner any shock at all. nod at the From h trials. Sir Hiram. . no assistants. lire I forty rounds n v seconds, making a record that 1,.- never b en broken. The mounting . i- gun was so mm h superior to all < -s that it has gone into use through- < .- w old on practi< ally every form • : . a. 1 he novelty consist* in placing T : i,:-..ms on a stati mary sleeve, al ill owing the gun to re.-oil inside the -1 a th a hydraulic Buller interposed f t -i the holler ami the sleeve. All f i, ’ - for training the gun is

attached to the sleeve instead of the barrel of the gun, thus completely eliminating the shock. In 1889 Sir Hiram took up the subject of aerial navigation, and after conducting a great number of experiments and considering the problem from every possible standpoint, it appeared to him that the best form of flying machine would lie what is known to-day as an aeroplane. The machine that he developed and made was practically the same as the best ma chines of to-day, except that it was much larger and was driven by a steam engine instead of a petrol engine. It had the fore and aft horizontal rudders the same as the Farnian machine of to-day, and the two screw propellers rotating in opposite directions the same as the Wright machine. This machine was 105 feet wide from tip to tip, and with 606 pounds of water and three men on board, it weighed 8000 pounds. The engine power was 360 horse-power. The screws were of wool, 17 feet 11 inches in diameter. and collectively gave a screw thrust of 2200 pounds, which propelled the machine along a railway track at the rate of forty miles an hour, giving a lifting effect of over 10.000 pounds. But the machine was altogether too large to be easily managed, and there was no room available in the neighbourhood. It was. however, the first machine in the world that succeeded in lifting itself from the ground with a man aboard. At the last Paris Exhibition. Sir Hiram was given the Personal Grand Prix in Artillery. Tie has also received high decorations from many governments. He was a director first in the Maxim Gun Company, then in the Maxim Nordenfeldt Company, and afterwards for twentT-scven rears in Vickers Sons and Maxim. Ltd., from which he resigned at t’- ago o f seventy-one.