Maxim brothers fascinated Mainers

Sir Hiram Maxim Will Not Run for the British Parliament,” announced a headline on Dec. 22, 1905, in the Bangor Daily Commercial. It was definitely a celebrity story for eastern Mainers. The man from Piscataquis County who had moved to England and changed the face of modern warfare by inventing the first fully automatic machine gun could attract public attention simply by doing nothing.

The newspaper retold the legend of Hiram, how he took his father’s idea from the backwoods of Maine and improved upon it until he had invented the gun that was loaded and fired through the energy of its own recoil. “The result was the Maxim Automatic gun, which has had more to do with the peace of the world in the last 20 years and the subjugation of savage races than any other ever invented by man,” said the newspaper.

Peace? I checked my Encyclopedia Britannica to get a fuller explanation of Sir Hiram’s role in keeping world peace: “Machine guns of the Maxim type had a destructive power never seen before in warfare. In the 1890s British infantry units used Maxim guns … to cut down hordes of poorly armed rebels in Africa and Afghanistan. In World War I, a few of them could cause thousands of casualties. Their defensive fire so limited the offensive power of infantry that the entire Western Front, from the Swiss border to the English Channel, became one vast siege operation.”

That doesn’t sound like Hiram deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. The pre-World War I era has been called the Age of Innocence with good reason. As the world teetered on the edge of the War-To-End-All-Wars, Maxim Guns, like battleships and other weaponry, were thought to be keeping the peace (the same way some people regard nuclear weapons today). But when all is said and done, people keep peace, not guns.

Even the United States became caught up in this world arms race. It, too, decided it needed a few Maxim Guns. A plan to create an artillery corps armed with Maxim Guns was the subject of an editorial in the Commercial on July 17, 1906. “The gun platoon armed with two machine guns will be able to discharge at the enemy a shower of projectiles equal to the entire firing capacity of the rest of the regiment,” said the writer. This was just a few years after the U.S. had its little adventure with imperialism called the Spanish-American War. More recently there had been some idle talk about war with Japan, the country that had just trounced the Russians.

Sir Hiram, the man who kept the peace before World War I, had become a guru on all manner of subjects. He was valued almost as much for his predictions as science-fiction writer H.G. Wells. “HIRAM MAXIM THINKS WE SHALL FLY SOON,” trumpeted a headline in the Commercial on Sept. 6, 1906. Maxim had experimented with a steam-powered airplane after inventing his gun, so he was as good as anyone to talk about the subject.

Even though the Wright brothers had already made their famous flights, scientists were still debating what the first practical plane would be like. Maxim predicted correctly it would be a heavier-than-air machine (as opposed to a dirigible) powered by a lightweight engine of the type developed for the automobile. The story ended with a pitch by Maxim, ever the self-promoter, for money from the English government so he could conduct more experiments. Steam-powered airplanes, however, were not in anyone’s future.

A few weeks later, Sir Hiram was back in the Commercial predicting the nature of future wars. “The wars of the future will be fought in the air. The chief weapon used will undoubtedly be something in the nature of an aerial torpedo,” he was quoted as saying on Dec. 1, 1906. Bombs? Missiles? Nuclear bombs and missiles? Maxim had envisioned the bloody century ahead.

Embroidering on his interview, the enthusiastic reporter commented chillingly, “there are few subjects more fascinating to contemplate in the abstract … than the potentialities of science when applied to wholesome slaughter. … Imagine the state of a town which is attacked by a half a dozen mechanical monsters out of reach, in the heavens, constantly dropping into it dynamite bombs.” Perhaps he meant “wholesale slaughter.”

Hiram’s younger brother Hudson, another great scientist in explosive matters, was also much-quoted back then. A few weeks after Hiram predicted aerial war, Hudson described his new underwater torpedo. “Driving a self-propelled torpedo by steam generated in the burning of high explosives carried within the torpedo in concentrated form, Hudson Maxim has concluded experiments from which he asserts that the range of naval torpedoes will be doubled and naval warfare revolutionized,” said a story in the Commercial on Jan. 19, 1907. The Maxim Torpedo, however, did not make the same mark in the history books as the Maxim Gun.

Two months later, on March 23, Hudson was once again featured in the Commercial touting a new “safety detonation fuse” for armor-piercing shells. Safe for whom, you ask?

Influential as they were, the two backwoodsmen from Maine were tools as well as beneficiaries of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex. The guns and explosives they invented could keep the peace only so long as diplomacy was successful. They helped create a fantasy world where wars and weapons at first seemed exciting and inevitable, and certain individuals profited immensely from them.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.