The Maxim Machine Gun and Smokeless Powder

Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Andrea investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosive History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick. For details, see the fall catalog at olliru.rutgers.edu. The course is described on page 31.

 

Hiram Maxim and his machine gun



Hiram and Hudson Maxim:  Inventors of the Machine Gun and Developers of Smokeless Powder

 

New Jersey's eccentrically brilliant brothers, Hudson Maxim (1853-1927) and his cantankerous, womanizing older brother Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840-1916) were both born into a poor, rural Maine family. Hudson claimed receiving his first shoes when he was sixteen. He rarely attended school and was self-taught. Astonishingly, Hudson Maxim's earliest claim to fame was as the author of a popular "teach yourself" book on penmanship. He also possessed a breathtakingly large ego, once bragging that he could write an article on almost any subject in the world without doing any research.

 

Both brothers were prolific inventors; Hiram received 200 patents in his lifetime, the most significant was for the machine gun. Hudson was also a serial inventor and tinkerer who received 60 patents, including one for smokeless powder. 

 

In 1881, when he was twenty-eight, Hudson sailed to London to help his brother Hiram establish an English branch of Hiram's company, U.S. Electric Lighting Company headquartered in New York. Hiram was not only the company's founder, but he was also the chief engineer who supervised the installation of the first electric lights in a New York office building. Hiram also claimed to be the original inventor of the light bulb, saying Thomas Edison knew more about patent law than electricity. When the brothers sailed for London, Hiram Maxim had a home in Fanwood, New Jersey, where he lived with his wife and three children. He may have had business reasons for travelling to England, but in addition he wanted to escape the public uproar over his bigamous marriage to his mistress who was traveling with him. He had another reason to beat it out of New Jersey – he may have fathered a child by a 15-year-old girl who claimed he had bigamously married her.

 

The Maxim Machine Gun

 

Hiram may have begun developing the machine gun while living in New Jersey, but after moving to England and with financial backing from Albert Vickers, Hiram was able to build a workshop where he refined his machine gun, receiving a patent in 1883 then establishing the Maxim Gun Company in 1884. It wasn't until 1889 that Maxim was able to sell a manufacturing license to the British Army. 

 

In 1888, Maxim hit the road selling his gun. One of his early targets was the German army but negotiating a license with arms manufacturers there was a cumbersome process involving several entities that already had interests in his British operation as well. He finally sold a seven-year license to his machine gun to the German company Ludwig Lowe in1892.  The Lowe Company joined with Mauser in 1896 to form Deutsche Waffen-und Munitionsfabriken AG and the Maxim license was re-negotiated.

 

Long before the war, the Vickers company had become a major shareholder in the Maxim Machine Gun Company and in 1897 Hiram Maxim sold all his remaining shares to Vickers.

 



Hudson Maxim


Smokeless Powder

 

The Maxim brothers knew Hiram's machine gun could revolutionize the way artillery was used in warfare, but until a way could be found to reduce the smoke it produced, promoting the gun was challenging. While the Maxim gun could fire up to 600 rounds per minute, the smoke generated by that many gunpowder-fired rounds produced a black cloud so large and so dense the gun's eye-watering, coughing three-man crew couldn't see the target, but the enemy could easily locate the position of the gun.

 

Of all the late 19th century American and European explosives pioneers eagerly promoting smokeless powder as a replacement for black gunpowder, Hiram and Hudson Maxim are among the most intriguing. Although their contributions to the development and commercialization of smokeless powder are largely forgotten, the Maxim brothers were important early participants and merit greater recognition. 

 

Some kind of smokeless powder was needed to make the machine gun more commercially viable. Fortunately, the Maxims had invented one, or rather each brother had invented one. Hudson claimed he had developed a type of smokeless powder before 1881 when he left for England, while his older brother Hiram claimed he invented smokeless powder long before his brother did. But neither brother invented smokeless powder. The real inventor of nitrocellulose, what Americans call smokeless powder, was a Swiss chemistry professor named Christian Schonbein who was working at his home in 1845 in Basel, Switzerland, when he accidently spilled nitric acid onto his kitchen table. Fearful of being scolded by his wife who didn't approve of his kitchen-based experiments, Schonbein grabbed the nearest cloth, his wife's cotton apron, used it to wipe up the spill then hung the apron over the oven door to dry. After it was dry, a "flash," or a "spark" (depending on who's telling the story) occurred igniting the apron that instantly burned up without producing any smoke.

 

Whether or not that story is true, Schonbein recognized that soaking cotton (cellulose) in nitric acid created a new molecule, nitrocellulose, that burns without smoke and could replace smoky black power in ammunition. He attempted to commercialize his discovery by selling a manufacturing license to a British company, but shortly afterward an explosion leveled the English factory killing eighteen workers. Schonbein returned to teaching chemistry.

 

As word of Schonbein's discovery spread, other European chemically-inclined entrepreneurs filed nitrocellulose patents. Among them were Paul Vielle of France in 1884, Dimitri Mendeleev (of periodical table fame) of Russia in 1892, and Alfred Nobel (the dynamite king) of Sweden in 1887. Each man established companies with production facilities, claimed their ideas had been stolen by at least one of the others, and devoted much time and energy suing each other for patent infringement.

 

European armies were becoming increasingly interested in smokeless powder and in 1889, coinciding with the British army's purchase of the Maxim gun, the British Explosives Committee began the process of selecting a nitrocellulose-based powder to replace the black gunpowder used to propel shells and bullets from guns large and small. The powder selected would become the official military powder of Great Britain to the exclusion of all others. Because all inventors were invited to submit samples to be tested, the American Hiram Maxim submitted a sample of his smokeless powder, and so did the Swede Alfred Nobel.

 

Neither the American nor the Swedish sample was selected. The winner was a type of nitrocellulose called "cordite" submitted by British citizens Frederick Abel and James Dewar. As members of the British Explosives Committee, they had examined all the submissions and read all the accompanying documentation before submitting their sample. The inventors who weren't selected claimed the selection process was rigged to favor the British citizens. Both Hiram Maxim and Alfred Nobel sued but lost in British courts and cordite became the official propellant for all artillery in the British Army. 

 

Twenty-five years later during WWI, vast quantities of it were used to fire bullets from the Vickers-Maxim machine gun, which may have been responsible for as many casualties as cordite-fired shells from field artillery pieces. Because the British army was unable to produce the tremendous quantities of cordite needed to fire all that ammunition, it contracted with New Jersey explosives manufacturers to make millions of tons of cordite and load it into shells which were shipped to Europe via South Amboy and Jersey City.

 

The Later Years of the Maxim Brothers 

 

Wealthy from the proceeds of the sale of his machine gun company, Hiram Maxim became a British citizen and settled into a comfortable life in England but became estranged from his brother Hudson, who had returned to New Jersey. Hiram was knighted in 1902 and the French awarded him the Legion of Honor. In his final years he wrote about philosophy and Christianity. In 1946, Hollywood released a modestly successful feature film about him, "So Goes My Love" based on the memoir A Genius in the Family written by his son, Hiram Percy Maxim, inventor of the gangster-friendly handgun silencer. The film, starring Don Ameche and Myrna Loy, is said to be a comedy. 

 

In 1890, Hudson Maxim established a smokeless powder factory in central New Jersey in a newly created town called "Maxim." He hoped to make a powder that would become the official powder of the U.S. army in the same way that cordite had become the official powder of the British Army. Although he sold Maxim powder to the army, it never became an official powder. Hudson Maxim retired to his mansion on Lake Hopatcong where he wrote The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language, publishing it in 1910.


COMMENT.  About one million machine guns were produced in World War One.  England was able to greatly increase its cordite production after a chemist developed a new and more efficient way to produce it. The chemist later became the first president of Israel.


After the United States entered the war, large quantities of another type of explosive was produced for French guns in exchange for France "loaning" artillery to the American army.



=====================================================================

Related posts:


Bismarck and the Origins of World War I


Europe on the Brink of World War I


For the beginnings of World War I, its consequences, and a bibliography, see 

The Beginning of the Twentieth Century:  The Start of World War I.


Also see other related posts:

Wealth and Power in Pre-World War I Europe 


The Austro-Hungarian Empire Before World War I


New Jersey Artillery Explosives Production in World War I



It is argued in the following post that the First World War was a major cause of much of the violence and disruptions of the 20th century.


For a related article on Hiram Maxim, see
   

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1243&context=mainehistoryjournal



For a list of all posts, with links, on this blog, see List of Posts by Topic


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