Hiram Maxim, Inventor of the Machine-Gun and Curling Iron

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's shooting? What? What's What's what's shooting? I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we ask
what is shooting? UM? Here with us today to answer
that question. Carl Casarda of Range TV. Carl, welcome to
the program. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to

(00:22):
be here. Do you do you like my NPR voice?
I did at the at the end they're kind of
trying to professionalize it a little bit. Yeah, I know.
It really takes this topic and makes it feel very
you know, astute and erudite. So I'm excited about this.
And Carl, you are, like me, very interested in firearms.
You are are professionally interested in firearms, unlike me because

(00:43):
I'm just I'm just a little bit of a hack
and a fraud. Um. And for Enranged TV, you do
all sorts of videos on on different kinds of weapons. Historic.
You've got a room full of historic guns that I'm
looking at right. I'm extremely jealous of your collection. It
looks it looks wonderful. UM. Carl, how are you, How
are you? How are you feeling today? Feeling pretty good?

(01:05):
Today is a pretty good day. You know, today is
actually the day we're recording this is uh Wyatt Earp
died in Los Angeles, California, and he, of course is
the prototype for the thin blue line police brutality we
have today. So hooray, Yeah, good for that. And uh,
today we're not gonna be talking thin blue lines stuff today, um,

(01:25):
although you know there might be a couple of shades
of that, but we are going to be talking about, Um,
we're gonna be talking about some gun related bastards, which
I thought I would have you on for um. And
the first bastard we're going to talk about is a
little fellow you may have heard of called Hiram Maxim.
Now what do you know about Mr Maxim? I know

(01:47):
that he had designed the belt fed water cooled machine
gun that every side of World War One used to
mow each other's children down. Yeah, he is why Europe
is no longer the economic center of the world, and
a lot of way there were other factors, but but
Mr Maxim played a role in that for sure. Um. Now, obviously, uh,

(02:10):
both of us are are very much into firearms as
a hobby. UM. I don't consider someone a bastard just
because they make a gun or really necessarily another kind
of weapons system. I do think there are certain weapons
systems like cluster bombs that you kind of have to
be a piece of ship to decide. UM. But as
a general rule, a gun as a tool, and and
there's nothing inherently a moral about designing a tool. UM.

(02:33):
That said, it's probably fair to note that within the
industry of people who design things for the purpose of killing,
there's probably a higher proportion of bastards than in a
lot of fields of industrial design. UM. And we are
going to talk today about two of the greatest gun
makers in human history. This week about two of the
greatest gunmakers in human history. Both of them were not
very pleasant people. UM. And, as I just stated here,

(02:55):
UM Steven's maxim is our subject today now here. UM
was were in on February five, eighteen forty and Singersville, Maine.
He wrote a biography later in life, the bulk of
which is a mix of lies and angry rants about
people he'd argued with. Like It's it's essentially at the
very end of his life, he drops, like the old
timy equivalent of a mixtape, yelling at all of the

(03:17):
people who he had had fights with over the course
of his career in the gun industry, and a lot
of it's like very technical stuff that I can't you know,
I can't tell you who actually invented the lightbulb, for example,
which is a major thing in his Did you actually
know much about Maxim the in his career before making
the machine gun? Honestly, no, I don't. I mean, I'm

(03:37):
very familiar with the gun obviously, or the machine gun
and how it revolutionized and changed warfare, But as for
the individual himself, no, I'm not not really familiar with
his life. Well, he was a really interesting guy. He's
one of these dudes that is just a compulsive inventor. Um,
Like one of those people who and it's this this
fascinating period the eighteen hundreds, is this moment where it's

(03:58):
also really easy to be an inventor because like industrial
like tooling and machining and whatnot has hit this this
level of professionalization and suddenly all sorts of things are possible.
And if you're into inventing, there's a lot there's a
number of dudes like Maxim who just over the course
of their life invent like sixty things that everybody uses today. Um.

(04:19):
And it's Maxim is one of those people. Um, and
he's he's he's a particularly interesting example on it. Now.
In his biography, which is again not a super reliable text,
he provides some thoughts on his family background that I
find interesting, and I'm gonna read a paragraph from that now.
This is him describing his ancestors. The ancestors of the
Maximum family with French Huguenots. They were driven out of

(04:40):
France and settled in Canterbury, England, from which place they
immigrated to Plymouth County, Massachusetts, where quote, they could worship
God according to the dictates of their own conscience and
prevent others from doing the same. Prevent others from doing
the same. That's very fun. Now, that's that's fun. I'm

(05:03):
gonna find my freedom so I can use it as
a wrench against others. Such a trend. Yeah, and Maximum
is being pretty self aware here. He is not that kind.
He's not a particularly religious man ever. Um. He famously
is more or less an atheist until he goes to
Russia to sell the machine guns, and they won't let
him talk to the czar unless he has a religion.
So he's like, I guess I'm Protestant. Better pick the

(05:25):
right one. Yeah, they didn't care. You just couldn't be
a pagan walking up to the czar, I guess, um,
so uh yeah. Most of the sourciers you'll find will
note that his father was a sheep farmer and very poor.
This is technically accurate, but I think it's accurate in
a way that gives readers an incorrect idea about here
UM's upbringing. Within his autobiography, he describes his family as

(05:47):
being comparatively well off. They just didn't have any money
because no one really had money at the time and
place where he lived, right, Like, they're not poor. Money
is not a meaningful fact of life for people living
in the wilderness of Maine in the eighteen forties. Like,
you don't do a lot of spending and stuff. Right.
They live in this kind of like community that's pretty

(06:07):
spread out and sprawling. Um, they were very self sufficient.
They bartered and traded with the people in their community
for the things they couldn't produce on their own. Like,
they were the kind of people who maybe a couple
of times a year they would go into a bigger
town and sell some products and use them to buy
a thing or two and they would have money for
that kind of brief period of time, but like money
is not They're not poor, they just don't have money.

(06:30):
Does that like make sense that kind of person. We
don't really have those people anymore. Yeah, well, I mean,
I'm sure there are some places in the world that
have some subsistence like that. But the reality is, if
you're self sufficient, you don't really need an Amazon Prime
account at that point. But you just you just do
your thing. You go out and get your milk, you
harvest your your your beef from your cows or whatever,
and you're good to go. That makes sense. Yeah, So
a lot of kind of popular sources on it will

(06:52):
say that he grew up poor. He doesn't seem to
have considered himself poor. He's like, well, we had everything
we needed. We just like, why would we have needed
money at that point? Um So, Yeah, at no point
in his childhood does Here seemed to have considered himself poor.
And their community was close to a group of Indigenous
Americans living in a small village nearby. Um Here's autobiography

(07:13):
is filled with the same kind of casual racism you
would expect from a book written by a man who
grew up in the eighteen forties. But it's also not
he's not like hateful in it. Um. And in fact,
there's a number of times where he will note stuff that,
like the way that the natives had positioned their village
was a lot smarter than how the white people had
put their houses because it was more protected from rain
and it got better sunlight. Um. So he was he

(07:35):
was somebody who was definitely possessed of the bigotry of
his time, um, but was also capable of like looking
at what these people were doing and recognizing that they
understood the the environment better and we're making smarter choices
about it, which he appreciated because he's got this kind
of mechanical mind right, Like he's somebody who thinks a
lot about efficiency, and he notes that their lives are

(07:56):
a lot more efficient than ours because they understand the
area better. Um. There's a point in his childhood where
like he and his father take advice from a local
chief they're friendly with on how to trap and prepare
different animals. More than anything, they hunted black bear, which
a lot of his early memories are like hunting black
bear with his dad. Um, and their community was the
kind of place that. There's a story he tells where

(08:17):
he and his dad are out in the field and
they see a black bear, so they run back to
their house for a gun, only to find that one
of their neighbors had spotted the bear, gone into their house,
grabbed their rifle and taking it out to go shoot
the bear. So it's like that kind of of community,
you know. Um, not only do people not lock their doors,
people feel fine grabbing like their their their neighbor's gun
to go shoot a bear if they see one. Um,

(08:39):
which is also not a very common thing today. I
don't think I've lived out in the in the sticks
a lot of my life, but I have not had
that kind of relationship with my neighbors. Yeah, I live
in a rural area as well, and I don't have
that relationship either. But at the same time, we live
in a world saturated with with the idea that we
know we technically in theory quote unquote know so many
people that we really don't. But I think it's changed
the nature of people live. Yeah, they definitely. Reading his

(09:02):
recollections of his childhood, I'm like, well, aspects of this
seemed kind of nice. This like all you worry about
is like producing what you need to survive. And that's
kind of this this this UM. It doesn't it doesn't
seem like a bad childhood, is what I will say
about it. UM. Now, we did a recent episode where
we talked about Melville Dewey that will be launching either

(09:24):
before or right after this one. UM Dewey who invinced
the Dewey decimal system and uh and hear him grow
up in kind of a similar time and in a
similar place, and the part of the Northeast they grow
up and is commonly known as the burned over district. UM.
And it's known that way because there's a shipload of
different social and religious extremist like Protestant kind of movements

(09:44):
that are swelling up and going swarming throughout the country
during this period of time. UM and here him or
was very aware of these kind of evangelical movements and
the influence they were having on the culture, and he
was not positive towards them. Neither was his family. And
I'm going to read a long excerpt from his autobiography
here because I think it's interesting and it gets you
into this guy's head because he's he is in a

(10:06):
their and extremely religious part of the United States. And
it is absolutely not something that that that that he
takes on in any sort of way. Quote. There have
been several epidemics of Millerites in the state of Maine,
sometimes called second Advents or world burners. These are Seventh
Day Adventists or what becomes that that, on one occasion,

(10:27):
having ascertained by diligent search in the Bible the exact day, hour,
and minute that the world would come to an end,
the saints disposed of their property. Some failed to plant
their crops, as they had enough to last until the
fatal day. When everything was in readiness for the final
end of all things, which was fixed for a certain
day in February. There was a lot of snow on
the ground. Some of the saints took great care to
have their watches and clocks corrected so as to know

(10:49):
the exact minute the final crash would come. The hour
fixed was about nine o'clock at night, and most of
the women appeared in their ascension robes. The Saints met
at a place called Gilman's Corner, in front of Gilman's
Little Store. Some repairs had recently been made to the roof,
and a ladder was still in position. A few minutes
before the final send off, an old and very fat
woman climbed up the ladder, got onto the ridgepole, and

(11:10):
walked forward to the end of the roof. She stood
there with her arms extended and her ascension robes fluttering
in the wind like a pair of wings. One of
the saints had his watch out and called off the
time as it passed, and when the exact minute arrived,
the old lady on the roof started to fly. She
gave a jump and landed in a big pile of snow,
which had a decidedly cooling effect and knocked every particle
of superstition out of her. She never had a relapse.

(11:33):
There was no one in the state of Maine that
ridiculed this movement with more reason and vigor than my
gifted mother. She had a lot of brains in the
top and in the front of her head and made
the best use of them. So that's his how he
feels about these kind of this religious movement that sweeps
through the country when he's a little kid. I find
that fascinating. Yeah, as an engineer and a person that
was clearly going to become a creator and an engineer

(11:55):
and a stem minded person. Seems like, very often we
don't see those types of things coexist. Someone that's very
scientific or technical or engineering wine it tends to not
be very superstitious and vice versa. They can be together,
but yeah, mostly you don't see them together. Yeah, and
it's interesting. He kind of his his family seems to
be very much opposed to this, Like they're they're they're

(12:16):
they're very practical people. Um, and he's kind of influenced.
He He definitely grows up with this kind of very
skeptical attitude about everyone around him, um, which is will
kind of become more of a factor in his personality
as he gets older. Um. But he grows up curious
about the world and a fairly open minded person for
his day. When he was fourteen years old, he was

(12:36):
apprenticed to a carriage maker, where he learned the basics
of engineering skills that would define his adult life. His
first invention came shortly thereafter, when he was working in
a mill with a terrific mouse problem. Here him set
to work on his own and designed an automatic mouse trap,
which was so successful that he was eventually able to
patent it. Many mouse traps today are based off of
his design, So like there's still mouse traps that are

(12:58):
based off the one he designed. When he's like fourteen
years old. UM, very smart kid, UM, and he's effectively adult,
an adult at fourteen, right, Like that's that's a kid today.
And like Germany in this period of time, you are
legally an adult at fourteen, and he's that it's pretty
much the same where where Maxim grows up. Like he's
he's working full time at this point, he's making a

(13:20):
man's wages and he's inventing a lot of ship. He
designs in his late teen years a silicate blackboard UM
in order to like make sketching out plans for other
inventions easier, and he he markets that a bit um
in the older adults around him recognized that he's kind
of a genius. When he's twenty four, his uncle Levi
hires him to work as an engineer in Abington, Massachusetts. UM.

(13:42):
And his uncle gives his nephew freedom to think an experiment,
which here him did until two years later he invented
the curling iron. He received his patent in eighteen sixty six.
And this is the first one he gets. He this
is he's also the inventor of the curling iron. The
guy who made the same dude invented the machine gun
and the curling iron. So now we can do our
fututions and we're getting rid of mice in our house. Maxim,

(14:04):
thank you so much. I can blame him for the
permanent scar I have from a curling and iron I
touched when I was like seven. So yeah, my favorite
meme the two hands shaking in the middle is Sophie
and millions of dead European boys and meeting in the
middle at angry at Hiram Maxims us with a bunch
of mice at the bottom with little protot exactly. Uh, so,

(14:29):
young Maxim was off to the races now. He designed
an automated sprinkler system soon after, but he struggled to
find investors for this product. We've talked about some like
industrial fires in this period. Folks are not convinced that
they need sprinklers or any kind of fire safety whatsoever
in this period of time. Well, the children workers are
easily replaceable. Yeah, there's a ton of kids you're gonna

(14:50):
put sprinklers in. So yeah, he can't really find any
investors for this um and he fails to convince any
moneyment that there was a future in the idea, but
he does draw interest from one wealthy backer, Spencer D. Schuiler.
Uh Now, Schuiler is not really interested in selling his
sprinkler system. He just sees that Maxim is extremely gifted. Um,
and it's like, well, I wanna I want to hire

(15:12):
this kid and profit off of his ideas. Uh Now,
this was an era in which electricity had become enough
of a thing that people knew any day now somebody
was gonna make a light bulb that people wanted in
their homes. Right, there are light bulbs at this point.
None of the people involved in the story about to
tell invented the first light bulb, but like, they're not good.
They blow up their fire hazards, They're not really a

(15:32):
thing you would want in your house. So it's this
kind of thing where people are trying to figure out
how to do a lightbulb. Well, and everyone knows it's
going to happen, it just hasn't quite happened yet, right, Like,
and there's kind of a race, right, all of these
different a lot of money. Edison is putting a lot
of money into like because everyone knows like, as soon
as we figure this ship out, it's going to be huge,

(15:54):
you know, artificial light anytime a day or night. That's
a that's a big deal. A lot of money in
that idea. UM. So Schuyler wanted in on that cash,
and he formed the US Electric Lighting Company with the
aim of being first to market. He made the young
Heiram Maxim, his chief engineer. Now, the story that follows
is very messy and a little beyond our scope today.

(16:15):
The short version is that Maxim worked alongside a guy
named William Sawyer. Sawyer was an inventor and is probably
the man who created the incandescent electric lamp, the first
good light bulb that you could like again, like the Sawyers,
probably the guy who figures this out first. Um. But
this is very messy because Edison also around the same

(16:36):
time his people come out and there's a series of
lawsuits over this, and saw Your wins most of the
lawsuits with Edison over the invention of the light bulb. Again,
he's probably the guy you would credit with US. Um.
He's also kind of a sketchy character himself. In eighteen
eighty he shot a doctor in the face during an
argument about their wives. So like he's he is a

(16:57):
messy fellow. Um and for the rest of his life
Sawyer and here him work together at this company. For
the rest of his life. Here And would argue that
he was the inventor of the first incandescent electric lamp,
or at least he claimed to have solved the problems
that made Sawyers lamp possible. Now, he never names Sawyer

(17:17):
in his autobiography, probably because he was scared of getting sued,
but he does go into a lot of detail about
the fact that his partner, who he calls Mr D,
was a nearly useless alcoholic. And I feel the need
to read an extensive quote from his autobiography here, because again,
this is like the guy who probably invented the first
electric incandescent lamp, and Maxim is so jealous about him

(17:39):
that he has to turn him into like a fucking
goblin in his autobiography, And I'm gonna read a quote
from that now. I found a very curious state of
affairs in Mr Schuyler's office. He had in his employee
a large, clumsy, brutal looking fellow, clean shaven, who we
will call Mr D. He was said to be an
expert electrician and telegraph operator. But he was a great drunkard,
being comfortably warned all the time, I had not heard

(18:02):
that description of drunk. I think we should bring that back.
You want to get in corned, Let's go get corn. Yeah.
The next day he told me that he was a
great believer in the future of electric lighting, that he
was the first in the field, and that if I
would take hold in a syst him, he would give
me a salary of ten dollars a day, as well
as a quarter interest in whatever might accrue from the work.
This was an exceedingly good offer, especially as I had

(18:23):
complete charge of the place. He informed all the men
that I had been put in charge, and the first
thing I did was have a talk with Mr d
I told him that it was not quite the thing
to have brandy brought into the place several times a
day and to keep drinking it while at his desk.
I assured him that there was a great deal more
nourishment in a pint of milk than in a gallon
of brandy, and advised him strongly to try milk. The
next day, he provided himself with a two quart tin pail,

(18:45):
and his brother was sent out two or three times
for milk. Mr D said the change was a good
one and he felt much better for it. Shortly after,
I learned that the so called milk was just about
half brandy and that the fellow was still in a
half drunken condition all day. I have no idea if
that's true. I was gonna say, did he just invent
the brandy milk punch? He may have. It's possible that
that Maxim is just lying because he's jealous. It's also

(19:06):
possible that Maxim is telling the truth. This guy was
a raging drunk and he still was invented the first
incandescent electric lamp um. I just find that very funny.
And also I I have trouble thinking of a more
disgusting drink combination than brandy milk. That doesn't sound good
to me. That doesn't. I don't mean like I like,

(19:30):
I like a white Russian, but brandy and milk, Just
straight brandy and milk. And we'll figure it out. Yeah,
we'll get corn. Maybe maybe i'd throw like a coffee
liqueur in there or something, but changes over there. Yeah
that would Yeah. I wonder how if you have if
it curdles um anyway, So whatever the precise truth about

(19:51):
Sawyer and his level of drunkenness by one to hear
him was a powerful and respected engineer is in his
own right. They don't beat Edison, but they make a
bunch of electric lamps that are good for like industrial
and entertainment lighting, and like they make a bunch of
money right there. They're selling lights all over the goddamn place.
So they Beta max of lights. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
mean I think it works a little better than that. Um,

(20:14):
unless you're a Beta max supremacist. No I'm not. I'm not.
I'm not sitting underneath one of your antique rifles. Yeah,
I watch all my video in Beta max. M hm.
So one he goes to the Paris Exposition. Now we
talked about in our Basil Zaharaf episodes where we're talking
about like the birth of the arms industry as in

(20:34):
its modern form. These expositions where a lot of that happens.
And they're not just about weapons, right, every kind of
a lot of ships being invented. There's combines and electric
lights and all sorts of ship there, but the most
popular things are always weapons, right, because human beings are
are human beings and people are not that interested in
in new fucking tractors. But if somebody makes a new gun,

(20:56):
everybody's gonna be like, well I want to look at
that motherfucker. Um, and this is are like we talked
about the crups. This is like these are the same
places where like Alfred krupp Is is putting his cannons
out in the like um so eighty one to hear
him goes to Europe for the Paris Exposition. His company
had made a bunch of fancy new lighting equipment to
show off, and he was basically running their booth. Uh,

(21:17):
this was a very important job, but here him's interested
hard already started to drift away from lighting. Now, the
story that comes next maybe apocryphal. I did not find
it in his autobiography, but every write up you ever
find of here in Maxim will include this story. Um.
I don't know if it actually happened. I think here
him said it happened that some occasions, it seems a

(21:38):
little bit like anyway, I'll just tell you the story.
While he's at this this exposition, he's friends with an
American and they're having a conversation about like the exposition
and the different inventions there and his friends says to him,
hang your chemistry and electricity. If you want to make
a pile of money, invent something that will enable those
Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility. And

(22:00):
that is supposedly what gets him to start working on
the Maximum gun um And if that's true, it does
say a lot about him that somebody's like, you know,
you make a lot of money helping Europeans murder each other,
and he's like, absolutely, wasn't wrong, wasn't wrong, not at
all wrong. Makes me think about Ron Harvard where they
had the bed about how to make a bunch of
money in religion, in this instance makes something to kill

(22:21):
Europeans kill each other. Yeah yeah, and he uh, he
decides to do this. Now there's another possibly apocryphal story
to explain his his how he gets the idea of
how to make the maximum gun, which is that he's
out hunting with like his family when he's a little
kid and he tries to fire it's it's usually said
as a rifle. I it seems like I don't know

(22:42):
if it's a rifle or a shotgun or something. But
he's trying. He tries to fire a gun that's too
powerful him because he's little, and it knocks him down.
And this is what gives him the idea to make.
The thing that made the Maxim gun so revolutionary is
that it used the recoil. And obviously you know this,
but for the listeners, it used the re oil of
firing around to advance the next round. And that's why

(23:03):
it's automatic, right, And that had not been done. There
was no fully automatic weapons in that way at the
time that we're actually like worked very well. Um. I
don't know that I believe it. You know, he knocks
himself down and that's what gives him the idea. Whether
or not it's true. If you're an engineering minded person,
it's not hard to notice that, Like, oh, every time
I shoot a gun at recoils and this energy is

(23:24):
just wasted, right, Like, there's all all this energy that
I'm not we're not doing anything with like, and as
an efficiency minded person, I have no trouble seeing how
here could be, Like, I gotta find some way to
tap into to make use of that. Um. Now, at
the time, the closest thing we had to a machine
gun was the gatling gun and and the gatling gun.
They're they're actually not legally that difficult to get in

(23:47):
a lot of the US today because they're not legally
automatic because you don't pull the trigger and fire and
it's crank operated. The legal definition of a machine gun
is to fire more than one round perpress of the trigger,
and does not do that. Yeah, so you could go
get a gatling gun right now, listeners, if you want
uh to defend your stagecoach. Um. I don't know what

(24:08):
a gatling gun would be useful for in a modern context.
You could conceal carry it to go to the Walgreens
and pick up your prescription. It's a dangerous world. Put
a pistol brace on a gatling gun. Um. So the
gatling gun was pretty good at what it did for
the time. Right, Like, if if you're in a world

(24:29):
where there's not even a whole lot of semi automatic
weapons and some motherfucker's got a gatling gun, that can
be a pretty potent tool. Um. It has its uses,
but it is not we would not call it today
a good weapon. Um. It's very heavy, it's not easy
to use, it is extremely prone to failure, and they're
very hard to mass produced due in part to the
fact that it's got a shipload of barrels, right, And

(24:51):
because it has a shipload of barrels, it's much easier.
It's actually much easier for a gun with a shipload
of barrels to get way too hot than than the
gun that Maxim makes. Maxim's gun has one barrel, but
it's water cool. There's a big jacket around it that
they fill with. I think it's like a gallon of water.
And it turns out that's a much better way to
stop a barrel from melting is quickly, um than than

(25:12):
than just having like eight barrels on a rotating gun. UM.
So Maxim's gun is like it's like going from UM.
It's like everybody had a go kart and he's he
pulls up in like a Toyota high Lux like it's
it's it's just so much better than what it existed before. UM.

(25:33):
One of the things that's probably important to know is
that gatling guns, most of them at about two hundred
rounds a minute was the rate of fire, which seemed
huge for the day. The maximum gun could fire six
hundred rounds a minute, and that's like the first version.
It actually gets a lot faster. I think they get
up to like a thousand rounds a minute. Um. But
but it's he's it's it just blows every other machine

(25:53):
type gun that exists at the time, and there's a number,
there's like volley guns, people have all sorts of different ways.
They tried to make a wet been that could suppress
people by shooting a bunch of bullets. Maxims is just
like there's not even a comparison to what came before. Yeah,
and and when you said, like with the water cooling
properly set up in a position, when you have a
water tank to the left or right of it with

(26:15):
a hose going into it, it evaporates and the evaporative
water from the heat of the machine gun goes back
into a condenser and you can actually keep a maximum
machine gun fire essentially in perpetuity. Yeah, as long as
there's bullets, like keeping gun bullets and water, you can
keep shooting. Yeah, which come World War One, that's exactly
what will happen. Um. Yeah, it's a it's a remarkable device. Um.

(26:39):
Now Uh. Maxim immediately dubbed his new weapon once they
had tested it out a daisy and he's set to work,
putting it in front of representatives of several European governments.
He starts trying to sell this to anyone who will
buy it. The British are very impressed by this, and
they give Maxim his first order. So he fought founds
the Maximum machine Gun Company in London. But after this

(26:59):
first big get, he has this like really impressive start,
but then no one else is interested in the thing, right, Like,
he just can't find buyers. There's a number of reasons
we'll talk about for this part of it. Um is
because Maxim winds up in a conflict with Bastard's Pod
alumni Basil Zaharov, who was kind of like one of
the dudes who innvinced the military industrial complex. Basil is

(27:20):
an arms dealer at this point, um, and he initially
dedicates himself to stamping out the Maximum Gun because it's
bad for his profits. I'm going to read a quote
from American Heritage magazine here. Maxim soon found that it
was one thing to build a machine gun and quite
another to sell it. When he tried to peddle his
weapon to the European powers, he discovered they preferred the
Norton Felt machine gun, even by the standards of the

(27:42):
eighteen eighties, the Norton felt was was primitive, but its
makers had one great commercial advantage. Basil Zaharov, a mysterious
East European who was the best armed salesman in the world. Suave, persuasive,
and utterly ruthless. Saharof's shadowed maxim around Europe, telling would
be buyers that the superb new weapon was the work
of a Yankee philosophical instrument maker who painstakingly made each

(28:02):
gun to measurements of the utmost accuracy one part of
a millimeter here or there, and it will not work.
Do you expect you could get an army of Boston
philosophical instrument makers to work them. So that's Zaharov's like tactic.
He's not saying it's a bad gun. He's being like, well,
it's too good a gun. You can't train your like
these bum fuck infantry men. You have to actually operate

(28:23):
this thing like it's way too smart for them. They're
gonna break it um which is which is a smart
way like, and anyone who sees it knows it's a
good gun. So that's how you convince them it's a
bad thing to buy When maliflus lying failed, Zaharof bribed
officials to buy the nordon Felt. When bribery failed, He's
sabotaged Maxims guns on the eve of their demonstration. Finally,

(28:43):
Maxim merged with the norden Felt company. But even with
the indefatigable Zaharov now on his side, he found the
going rough. Many countries were suspicious of the revolutionary weapon,
and others simply didn't care. One Turkish official waived Maxim aside, saying,
invent a new vice for us, and we will receive
you with open arms. That is what we want. And
you do find that line in his autobiography. Whether or

(29:05):
not it's apocryphal, I don't know. But um, he was
really ahead of the game. The people couldn't. He was
envisioning something that these people couldn't comprehend. You, yeah, yeah,
And there's a lot of resistance. He tries to sell
this to the United States, and the War Department doesn't
want the thing. Um, we think it's it's seen as
unworthy by military standards. And there's this you see this
again when there starts to be this move to like

(29:26):
give infantryman semi automatic and automatic weapons, where It's like
they're just gonna waste the AMMO, Like this isn't gonna
help anything out there, just gonna like ruin our supply
lines and run through bullets too quickly. Um, there's this,
you know, the these these old kind of like military
brass types aren't don't really see how much this is

(29:48):
going to change the nature of conflict. Um. There are
some guys who do. But but but the people who
are making purchasing decisions in the United States are like,
absolutely not. We don't want these fucking things, which is
and it says. It says a lot that Americans are
turning down a gun like this, about like just how
stuck in their ways they are. Somebody like yeah, um,

(30:09):
and perhaps the machine gun would have remained a curiosity,
something large mustache general scoffed at as they drank brandy
in their war tents before ordering bayonet charges. But the
British were more far sighted than most, not all of them.
There's a lot of resistance in the British military towards
adopting the maximum gun. Um. But there are guys who
see the use that this thing is going to have,

(30:30):
not to fight European wars, but to help them police
their enormous colonial empire, because the British at this point
control more of the world than damn near anyone has
ever controlled. And there's not a lot of fucking British
people right, like, they don't have many you known, you know,
any more Boars per minute you can kill with the
machine gun. Yeah yeah, yeah, um and ad break real quick,

(30:56):
you know who else killed a lot of Boers? I've
been just laughing at who it could possibly we we are.
This podcast is entirely supported by Lord Kitchener. Um. Yeah,
so uh go uh occupied mayficking and listen to these ads.

(31:22):
It was a Boer war joke for abably sitting at
home for the empire. Yeah whatever, Okay, we're back. So
uh yeah British, some guys in the British Army see
the max and theent is like, well, this is a

(31:43):
thing that could actually help us deal with the manpower
shortages we have in the fact that like this, the
scramble for Africa is happening. In this period they've massively
expanded their holdings. And this is also a period where
kind of early on in the European occupation, um, they
have this shock and awe thing because their weaponry is
a lot better than what's available on the continent to
the indigenous people. That's starting to change by the late

(32:06):
eighteen hundreds. UH, Indigenous resistance in Africa in this period
isn't mostly like dudes with you know, the very like
kind of stereotypical images of guys with like shields and
spears charging volleys of gunfire. It's insurgents with rifles. Like,
they have rifles now, and their resistance is starting to
get a lot more effective. Um So, while European weaponry

(32:27):
had initially represented a Titanic advantage, that started to turn
in this period. UM. Africans have a lot more access
to guns, and enough time has passed that different groups
have developed an understanding of European combat tactics and how
to disrupt encounter them. This came to a head with
the modest uprising. Like the Madhi the Islamic sort of um, yeah,

(32:48):
messianic figure. Yeah, the Madi is like, is like the
Islamic messianic Messianic is the word I was leaving for.
It's the Islamic messianic figure. So there's this guy calls
himself the Maddy. There's a big uprising um in like
North East Africa against the British, like in the Soudan
and everywhere. Um. And it doesn't go great for the British.
They suffer some really significant reversals um. And it leads

(33:09):
to like this whole situation gets out of hand enough
that one of their governors, a guy named Imman Pasha,
gets surrounded and sieged by this massive, fairly well equipped
army of modest warriors. Now, despite the British Army's purchase
of a number of Maxim guns, many generals still preferred
the gatling gun. Others considered it, and this is a
direct quote from a British general unsporting. So there's this

(33:31):
attitude that, like, it's not sporting to have a machine gun,
which it is not. They're not incorrect, colonialism is sporting.
Killing too many of them with an automatic weapon is unsporting.
So yeah, you have to at least give them some
illusion of chance, right yeah yeah. Um. And in eighteen
eighties six h Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who we have

(33:52):
talked about a lot on this show, is sent to
relieve and rescue Imman Pasha from the Mahdi's men. Now,
this relief effort is kind of mess. But he's sent
with a prototype of the Maxim gun and this is
like the first time it's really used in colonial combat,
mostly in like protecting his forces as they retreat, and
it's it works great, Like if you are trying to

(34:12):
run away while outnumbered, having a Maxim gun at your
back is a pretty pretty sweet thing to fucking have. UM.
So folks start to take notice within the British military
braass that like, well, this thing's this This could solve
a lot of problems for us UM and the battle
leads to more widespread adoption of the Maximum gun by
the Bridge. In eightee, all of this comes to a

(34:35):
head in what is now Zimbabwe at the Battle of Shangani. Now,
this was the most decisive battle of the First mata
bell A War, and we talk about this a bit
during our Cecil Rhodes episodes. UM. But the Battle of
Shangani is a fight between or the Matabelli War is
a fight between the forces of the British South Africa Company.
So these are British soldiers, but they're soldiers of a

(34:57):
corporation that's also kind of a froment in its own right.
We talked about this in the most Corporation in the
World episodes. We we've got over a number of these things. Um,
and these guys, these British South Africa soldiers, This the
Matta Belly War is the war that like leads to
the establishment of Rhodesia. Right, this is like where we
get the roadies and stuff from and a whole lot

(35:17):
of problems as a result of that. It's still having
that debate today, still having that probably, yeah, still still
an uncomfortable number of Facebook ads selling me roodation camouflage. Kere.
It is a nice pattern. Um so yeah, oh no, yeah,
nothing against their aesthetics. Going out and fighting in that
camera with your short shorts looked pretty cool. But what

(35:40):
they were actually doing wasn't all that cool. No, it
was not cool. Um but yeah. So the leader of
the Matta Belly, a guy named Globin Gula, has twenty
thousand riflemen. Um and the Matta Belly were competent strategists
and pretty well organized and disciplined. At Sheanani, three thousand
of their best men surrounded a force of seven hundred
British soldiers. Now, in an earlier period, this probably would

(36:02):
have been a massacre. Or at the very least a
hard fought and brutal retreat for the British. But on
this day the forces of the South Africa Company had
the Maxim gun and the Mata Belle had not. In
the slaughter that followed, more than fifteen hundred Matabelle are killed,
largely by the four Maxim guns the British brought to
bear on their forces. Four British soldiers died. Nothing like

(36:24):
this had ever been seen in colonial warfare, like a
kill ratio like this, um. It was it was unthinkable
as a disaster for the Manta Belle. Their leader commits
suicide on the battlefield. Several other warriors hang themselves during
the retreat. It is um a calamity for them, and
it is it's like it's a shock around the world
because this is the first time that you see what

(36:45):
a machine gun can do. Um And obviously fifteen hundred
to four it's a pretty stark uh lesson here, yeah,
real shades of the Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is I mean,
I mean a number of the men killing the Matta
Belli that day would probably die go on to get
killed by machine guns on the Western front. Um. So

(37:08):
it was very impactful back home Shangani, the battle is
an instant hit back in England, there's breathless news coverage.
There's all these lurid illustrations of like British soldiers heroically
surrounded fighting off hordes of barbarians. And this has compounded
a week later when a force of six thousand Mata
Belli attack Bimbezi and are again massacred by mass fire

(37:29):
from Maxim's gun. Twenty warriors die in this battle and
Matta Belli resistance crumbles after this, bringing the whole world
Rhodesia um. And these are just like these are nightmare battles,
Like if you actually think about what it means to
mow down with machine guns, it's horrific. But that's not
the picture that the British people, like the people back home,

(37:52):
are actually getting of these battles, which is we're going
to talk about in a bit um. But the impact
of this gun on the colonization of Africa is enough
on its own that Maxim would get a place in
behind the bastards. His gun makes the largest and most
terrible era of European domination in Africa possible. Right, the actual,
like the the real like the scramble for Africa and

(38:14):
the real complete lockdown of the continent by Europeans. I
don't think happens without the Maxim gun. It's absolutely necessary
in a lot of the atrocities that comes next, and
without Maxim there is certainly no Rhodesia Um And we
could go on for a long time about the the
horrors and lingering consequences of that pariah state. The centrality

(38:36):
of the Maxim gun to colonial military strategy was immortalized
by the writer Hilaire Bellock in a line uttered by
one of his characters, whatever happens, we have got the
Maximum gun and they have not. Now that's a quote
I think a lot of people have heard, especially if
you've listened to Dan Carlin's wonderful series on World War One.
But it actually it's very meaningful for how soldiers thought

(38:59):
about the mack some gun. That's not how civilians thought
about the Maxim gun. And the actual the influence of
the Maxim gun on the culture of colonizing nations is
a lot more insidious than you might think. Now I
want to show you a popular picture of the Battle
of Shangani, illustrated by artist Richard Woodville. Jr. So if
we can you drop that into the chat. This is

(39:20):
really interesting and not something I really had thought about,
because I had assumed when I read it, I'd read
about this battle a few times. I thought, I assumed
the people back home knew, Oh, we had a machine gun,
and so we were able to kill a shipload of people,
and that's why we didn't have so many warriors die.
That's not what a lot of British people know. They
just know four of our guys died for theirs because

(39:41):
we're such good fighters, right Like, That's that's the lesson
that they take. And it's a lesson that is um
it's uh, it's put forward in a lot of these
colonial paintings and illustrations. And this this this illustration I'm
showing you right now, there's like a bunch of British
soldiers and like cowboy style hats on a wagon train
and they've got rifles in hand, and there's there's natives

(40:03):
charging at them at very close range getting gunned down.
There's dead horses, wounded British soldiers and it looks like
it's happening at very close range, and it's this like
desperate struggle, right that's fascinating because as as as as
as noted, there's not a maxim here in sight. It
really looks this this, this artwork is the typical authoritarian
style artwork at which it shows the massive fighting capabilities

(40:26):
and brilliance of our heroic men fighting off at this
last stand and their their capabilities made it four to
what you said. But the reality is we didn't want
to give the citizens the reality that we were just
massacring essentially defenseless people with improved technology. Yes, and it
is it is really important to note, like you said,

(40:47):
there's not a maximum gun visible in this every it's
it's men with rifles, right, That's that's really worth noting.
Um So the fact that this picture excludes the maximum
gun to present an unrealistic picture. The battle is not
an isolated event. In fact, historians have studied and written
extensively about how comprehensively the maxim gun, arguably the most

(41:10):
essential tool for this phase of colonialism, was excised from
the British popular imagination. And I'm gonna quote now from
a write up by Raymi Miz of the Rutger's Art
Review Graduate Journal. Quote, these brutal imperial campaigns were subsequently
met with a mountain of printed pictures in order to
satiate the interests of an eager British public. Few artists

(41:31):
contributed as prolifically as Richard Caton Woodville Jr. To the
wealth of war imagery that colored the widely circulated illustrated newspapers.
A self professed special war artist of the eighteen eighties
and eighteen nineties, albeit one who had never personally experienced battle,
Woodville submitted thousands of drawings to a wide variety of publications,
covering almost every imperial crusade. His illustrations, prints and oil

(41:53):
paintings incorporated the accepted motifs of high Victorian military art,
such as the belief in great men and mill terry heroes.
The depiction of war is an inspiring adventure, filled with
noble sacrifice and a compositional focus on hand to hand
combat and glorious cavalry charges, fraught with soldiers courageously lunging
and thrusting with swords and bayonets. However, almost never does

(42:15):
the machine gun upon which the majority of these colonial
victories were wholly dependent make an appearance. So from the
eighteen nineties up to the early nineteen hundreds, Colonial victories
against what seemed like long odds were celebrated in the
news and popular nonfiction with stories of heroism next to
full color illustration of small bands of Englishmen surrounded fighting

(42:36):
back to back against words of enemies. The maximum gun
isn't in almost any of these pictures. It virtually does
not appear in British popular illustrations of war in this period. Meanwhile,
the individual man with a rifle is nearly worshiped, and
there grows to be an increasing connection between the very
idea of manhood and the rifle. As F. Nori's Connell

(42:58):
wrote in his eighteen How Soldiers Fight. Apart from his physique,
the Britisher has no particular qualification as a cavalier, and
he lacks the quick intelligence of the boar and artilleryman.
But give him a rifle and a bayonet, and let
him have two years training to make a man of him,
and yet two more to remind him that he cannot
be one without the other. You see what he's saying there.

(43:19):
You need all this training not just to teach you
how to use a rifle and to make you into
a man that, but to remind you that you're not
a man without a rifle like that's it's this is
masterful propaganda. And a lot of the history work I
do within range I find what is so interesting to
me isn't that the narrative itself that's painted, and frequently
of the narratives are lies, or even if they're not lies,

(43:41):
what's most interesting is the things are the things that
are intentionally left out that paint the picture they want.
And this is a great example of that. It's not
it's not what they say, it's what they don't say
that frequently makes the narrative. Yeah, and it's remind me
to talk about how that kind of refer what in
what might be about to be the modern version of

(44:03):
this with modern weaponry um, because there's a conversation there.
But in his paper, Raymie Miz cites this this guy's
quote and makes what I think is an extremely astute
observation quote In this estimation, the firearm is not simply
an ancillary tool, but rather a constitutive agent in the
making of the modern male soldier. Wood Fills pictures, when

(44:24):
examined through this lens, demonstrate that the machine guns usage
and physical mechanisms both analogize and reinscribe the volatile nature
of constructions of masculinity at the turn of the century.
In other words, the act of being a man with
a rifle is seen as the ideal of manhood, but
the reality, which is that individual rifleman matter very little
next to the presence of a maxim gun that's hidden.

(44:46):
Ramie goes on to write, the effectiveness of the gun
was impervious to mass casualties. As long as one man
survived to aim a functional gun, the odds remained in
his favor. Manpower was rendered almost irrelevant, and the gun
reigned supreme. As such, the machine gun was a vitally
useful tool in the colonization of Africa, and, as John
Ellis chillingly pronounces time and time again, automatic fire enabled

(45:10):
small groups of settlers or soldiers to stamp out any
indigenous resistance to their activities and to extend their writ
over vast areas of the African continent. Yet, also according
to Ellis, in England, in other countries, machine guns remained
hidden until the very outbreak of World War One. As
previously mentioned, this is certainly corroborated by the machine gun's
absence in popular war imagery and news coverage. What might

(45:31):
be the underlying reasons for such reluctance on the part
of the army and special war artists to acknowledge the
machine guns influence in their campaigns. For one, to quote
Ellis once more, where was the glory? Where was the
vicarious excitement for the reader's back home? If one told
the truth about the totally superior firepower, one couldn't pin
a medal on a weapon. The machine gun refuted the

(45:52):
need for almost all forms of traditional Victorian military heroics,
direct combat, cavalry charges and the traditional British infantry school air.
As Ellis observes, Europeans, as particularly the British, were too
concerned with trumpeting the virtues of their small squares of
heroes to admit that much of the credit for these
sickeningly total victories should go to the machine guns. I

(46:13):
don't want to get ahead of the discussion here, but
this makes me think right off the bat about the
machine gunner using these weapons against the indigenous people not
that different than someone sitting at a computer launching drone strikes. Yeah,
that's one of the things I want to talk about.
Another of them would be UM, the wire guided missile,
which is almost invisible in American popular depictions of combat UM,

(46:35):
but is uh the most important weapons system and a
lot of the different conflicts that were involved in right now,
and is UM. I have some some friends who are
deep like one of the things they're concerned about is that, like, well,
if you look at a lot of our near peer adversaries,
one of the things that they're doing is they're putting
a lot of wire guided missiles on small transports, UM,

(46:56):
little armored vehicles and stuff like that, even on like
technicals uh UM in the United States, which is very
dependent on large armored vehicles like im wraps, does not
do that to nearly so much of an extent. And
these huge vehicles that we've built in order to render
our troops effectively invulnerable to roadside bombs, into all forms
of incoming fire, you they're almost can't shoot one of

(47:17):
those things to pieces unless you've got like a fucking
Milan or some other kind of wider guided missile, in
which case it's just a big tomb UM. And it's
one of those things. I can remember sitting in the
fucking dustin Mosele with a couple of little Iraqi kids
drinking water and like watching these massive im wraps drove by.
Those are the only times I ever saw Americans that
weren't journalists out and Mosel you never saw them in person.

(47:38):
They were in these titanic and vulnerable vehicles, and uh,
those things are more or less invulnerable when you're fighting
somebody Who's best anti armor weapon as a homemade RPG
UM or something they may have stolen from the Iraqi armory,
but they're going to be increasingly useless in a world
that has so many more of these weapons. In part

(48:00):
of this, we've just been shot gutting them all over
the goddamn place, like that's the big thing. We gave
the Kurds a shipload and we get we've we've given
them all over the place because it's an easy weapons
system to give your allies to enable them to take
out any kind of armored vehicle effectively. UM and the
fact that it makes no presence in American popular imagination
and is the kind of thing that I could think

(48:21):
could be completely disruptive to us. Battle doctrine is something
that is going to be a thing at some point,
like the UM. But you know what else is completely
disruptive to us battle doctrine. Carl. Uh. Social media, well yeah, yeah,
that that that might take it hit yea Twitter, Twitter,

(48:44):
um could be a real problem. Um. But also the
products and services that support this podcast. Uh, we're back.
One thing. I should also note you ever do any
play any Warhammer when you were a kid, Carl? Actually
I didn't. I mean, I'm really familiar with the aesthetic,

(49:05):
but yeah, I never played it myself. It struck me
as I was looking through all these old paintings of
like British military victories in Africa, like, oh, that's what
all of the old Warhammer arts is based on, because
obviously those are kids all grew up in like British
public schools and saw a million of these a circle
of men surrounded by a horde of enemies like that
sort of thing. Like, Yeah, it's interesting when you find

(49:28):
those connections like that, the things that the echoes of
things from the past that then manifest themselves and ways
in the future, even so something as simple as science
fiction art. Yeah, I always find that fascinating. Yeah, it's
really interesting to me, and I'm sure there's more to
be I'm sure somebody who wanted to could write a
very interesting paper on that. Um. But yeah, So the

(49:49):
point that my is the author of this paper is
making is crucial to a number of the historical events
that come next after kind of the Scramble for Africa.
The supposed fearlessness of Colone Neil soldiers against tremendous numerical
odds was made entirely possible by machine guns, but the
massive popular imagination around these events led to widespread attitudes

(50:09):
in Victorian England and beyond that the truest way to
become a real man was to go and see war.
And it was a pretty safe bet because since you've
got the fucking maximum gun, you'll probably survive, and you'll
you'll come back with this story or whatever, and you
continue this this kind of legend of of what these
fights are like, because you don't want to tell people, well,

(50:29):
we just kind of pulled the trigger on a maxim
gun until there weren't people left. Victorian scholar Angus McLaren notes,
to be a man required effort and labor that was
not required of a woman. One did not go to
female by force to will her to be a woman.
She was born one. And mis goes on to include
The machine gun, however, negated most of these characteristics of manhood. Indeed,

(50:51):
it obstructed any opportunity for legitimate confrontation when used against
poorly armed opponents, and rendered obsolete qualities like strength and
skill in hand to hand in combat. So the British
and other colonizing nations are increasingly glorifying this idea of
the colonial soldier, of the man willing to fight for
his empire, of of the value of like physical courage

(51:13):
and like being willing to get stuck into a fight,
and also obscuring the fact that none of those qualities
matter anymore because machine guns exist. We see this echo
again in Rhodesia when their slogan was be a man
amongst men. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's this, it's this very
false idea of the nature of conflict in order to
and in this period, it's less of a con because

(51:34):
most of the men who joined the army in this
period like that. You go over and get shipped Africa, Yeah,
you'll probably make it back. You're you're not likely to
face serious threat because you've got this weapon. Once the
machine guns get turned on each other, you know, it's
a different it's a different thing um. And of course
the reality is that Maxim's gun had rendered courage, skill
and toughness completely meaningless. Uh. Nothing matters when you're standing

(51:58):
in front of a machine gun but that there's a
man behind that machine gun. But an entire generation of
British and European manhood was raised on fantasies about what
war was going to mean in the twenty first century.
Here Maxim got unfathomably rich, selling governments the instruments by
which this generation would be slaughtered and mass By the
end of the eighteen hundreds, all the nations of Europe

(52:19):
were going gaga from Maxim's gun. He sold it to
the Germans as the mg O nine, to the British
is the Vickars and as his weapon flew off the
proverbial shelves. He made regular improvements and upgrades to increase
its reliability and killing power. He developed his own smokeless
powder alongside his brother Hudson, which made the weapon much
easier to use in mass confrontations between two proper armies.

(52:40):
This is the last big development that makes it effective
for European conflict. Because the first version of the Maxim gun,
there's the kind of smoke that it makes is so
distinctive that you can target it with artillery very easily.
The new smokeless powder and makes it a lot harder
to see and thus harder to like just blow up
the machine guns when you find them with you know,
field guns or whatnot. Um Maxim is over was overjoyed

(53:02):
to sell his weapon to multiple sides in the same war.
This happened first in nineteen o five, when both the
Russians and Japanese went to battle with his guns. If
any of these powers were irritated at Maxim, they wanted
his weapon badly enough to keep their mouth shut. The
Queen of England made him a British citizen in nineteen hundred,
which he was happy to accept. He had never quite
forgiven the United States for refusing to buy his weapon.

(53:25):
Most of the rest of Maxim's life was, in fact
a process of him using his fame and wealth to
harp on slights and grudges. His autobiography was largely a
canvas for him to lay out petty irritations against other inventors.
He even fell out with his brother Hudson, jealous that
Hudson had an equal faculty for invention At one point,
Hiram hired a private detective to stalk his brother and

(53:45):
sabotage his work. Hudson would later claim, he told me
one time that if the telescope hadn't been invented, he
would have invented it. And I think he never felt
kindly towards Galileo for having got ahead of him. That's
he's very offended by the fact that other people make things.
Uh so, yeah, a bit of a dick. Hudson responded
to his brother's provocation by tracking down Helen Layton, a

(54:08):
teenage girl that here Him had tricked into marrying him
while he was already married to someone else. Maxim was
charged with bigamy. Although he was acquitted, the charges ensured
that he was the subject of mockery and whispered discussion
for the rest of his life. By the time he
was an old man, here Him was completely deaf from
years of weapons testing without hearing protection. He also suffered

(54:28):
bronchitis for the last sixteen years of his life, which
has probably had something to do with, you know, all
of the gunpowder and explosions and stuff he hung out around,
or whatever chemicals he was every day. Could God only
knows what kind of ship he was inhaling, you know, Um, yeah, uh.
And that actually led to his last really significant invention,
which was an inhaler to basically help with like asthma

(54:51):
and the like. He called the Pipe of Peace UM
his design because you couldn't spray with the kind of
force that you can today. It was like a long
glass tube where you would kind of like a crack pipe,
heat a thing in a glass bulb and then inhale
it to the back of the throat. UM, which was
it was. It was a big improvement over similar kinds
of devices that had existed before. UM. He filled his

(55:12):
with menthol and evergreen mixed with water. UM. And he
believes this is the first time that mental was ever
used for this account, to like actually decongest and sue
the throat. He's the first person to use menthol for
that purpose, um, he claims. Um. I don't I I
haven't found any arguments against that. I'm sure it was
used in in some sort of indigenous medicine before he

(55:32):
came across it. But he's certainly the first person to
like do this and market it. UM and these are
very popular his inhalers. He sells hundreds of thousands of
these um, and it's it's funny because, like, this is
actually a really significant invention. It's a major device within
kind of the line of descendant of the asthma inhaler
and stuff like, it's a very meaningful development for like

(55:54):
human health that he contributes to here um. But a
lot of people make fun of him for it. They
call it like a quack remedy and attack him for
it in a way that he never had been before
in his career. And so in his nineteen fifteen autobiography,
Maxim wrote, quote, it will be seen that it is
a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and
nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to

(56:16):
prevent human suffering. He and wrong, that's what people like, right, No, seriously,
this is so interesting. This guy was all over the board.
I mean, from being being associated with the light bulb
to making one of the worst in terms of effective
killing machines on the battlefield, to something that actually legitimately
was a medical health device. I mean that's wild. Yeah,

(56:37):
it is. I mean the curling iron, don't forget the
curling iron is obviously curling uh Hiram Maxim lived long
enough to see his weapon reach its pothesis during the
outbreak of the First World War. He died in the
winter of nineteen sixteen, most of the way through the
Battle of the Psalm. By that point in the war

(57:00):
were than seven hundred and fifty thousand British soldiers had
been killed. The majority of these deaths, by some accounts
like two thirds were the result of German machine guns,
and one day at the Song more than twenty thousand
British boys were cut down by machine gun fire. Um
so he lives to see it, and in the days
before his death, there's no evidence that he was actually
troubled by this at all. According to the website American

(57:22):
Heritage Quote, he had other concerns. In his last years.
He had rented a front room at the top of
the building in a London business district, and there he
spent hours blowing black beans out of a pea shooter
at a Salvation Army band that regularly played across the street.
Such interesting questions about like it raises such interesting questions

(57:45):
because technology is going to advance, whether you're the person
doing it or there was gonna be another machine gun right,
and so I'm not justifying. At the same time, the
question is if it wasn't maximum with someone else, So
I bet you that was pretty much where he was
putting his mindset at that point. You have to write,
especially when you're hearing like, oh I made a thing
and twenty kids died in a day because of it,

(58:06):
Like yeah, of course you and you're not like obviously
and other people were working on this. Someone would have
made a machine And I think you could argue it
like yeah, but maybe he was so smart. Maybe it
would have taken another ten years. And maybe that means
colonialism in Africa never really gets to the same point,
or like we can do what ifs all the day,
live long day. Obviously, I I tend to be more

(58:27):
trends and forces than great man. And it's like someone
would have developed this, right, there would have been machine
guns mowing down a generation of of of European youth
in World War One, with or without here in maxim.
Maybe the guns wouldn't have worked as well, maybe it
would have taken longer. You know, these are all things
that can be debated on. He was predominantly done with

(58:49):
single shot trapter or rifles. Right, yeah, yeah, Um, so
obviously it's one of those things. It's probable. I think
it's either kind of between him or Krupp because Field artiller,
he also kills an astronomical number of people. Um probably,
but probably him or Crupp. That you would say is
like the weapon inventor, who's whose invention killed the most people,

(59:11):
both directly and like every other machine gun that exists
up to the modern day is in some way descended
from the maximum gun, right like, even if it's just descended,
and that machine guns have a place in every military
as a result of the success of the maxim guns.
The same with like Crup's artillery, right like, it's all descended.
That said, if Krupp hadn't figured out how to make

(59:32):
cannons better than the big old brass Napoleonic ones, someone
was going to write like it these are all worth
talking about. Um yeah. That's one of the interesting questions
that always pops up with the work I do, especially
with firearms, and it applies to this, which is I
intrinsically come from the idea that technology is going to
happen regardless, and that the question isn't sure or should

(59:54):
not technology exists I mean, there's a lot of things
in this world I wish didn't exist. To be nice,
to live in a world without water, cold belt field,
machine guns, and nuclear weapons. But the reality is they do.
And the problem isn't necessarily this technology. It's what we
as humans do with it. Yeah, and it's and I
think that's where the degree to which he's more morally
culpable is the Yeah, of course I'll sell the both

(01:00:14):
sides that everyone should have this thing. I want to
get this out there as much as is fucking possible. Um.
And then to be honest, though, like the greatest evil
done as a result of the maximum gun is I
think what we talked about in the middle of the episode,
the hiding it from the populaces of the nations, using
it until it couldn't be hidden anymore. That's and that's
not on maxim. That's just that that there's a lot

(01:00:38):
of blame to go around there, and it's it's a
really fascinating thing to think about. And that's the thing
that didn't have to happen, right, someone was going to
make a machine gun. It wasn't inevitable that the machine
gun would be hidden from the people paying for it
to be used on other folks. That wasn't inevitable. It
makes you wonder what we're not aware of right now? Yeah, well, yeah,
we can talk about a number of different weapons systems, yeah,

(01:01:01):
or other things for that matter, right yeah, But yeah,
that's the story of here in Maxim Carl, that's that's
pretty amazing. I mean, obviously I'm very familiar with the
weapon and what it was, what it was used for
World War One. I was not as familiar with it's
used in the colonial efforts, which is particularly fascinating. Like
I said earlier, the what's what's masterful propaganda is less

(01:01:24):
about what people talk about, but what they leave out
of the narrative, and that in this instance painted a
very dismal picture. Like you said, there's no honor in
going to be a soldier for the British Empire and
then pushing a button and slaughtering people defenselessly. There's no
honor and that even that's not sporting, as they would say, right,
um and uh. But at the same time, they definitely
wanted people to feel as though that the that honor

(01:01:46):
was to be in that in that empire, and to
further the empire's goals, the amount of people murdered in
the process totally irrelevant. Yeah, And it is this thing
where war becomes very unsporting. Um. And that's that's a
big part of like this, the first year, particularly of
World War One, is all of these these gallants French
soldiers and their colorful pants, and these legions of German

(01:02:10):
sixteen year old boys that the slaughter of the Hitler's
first big battle, if I'm not mistaken, Um, all of
these young men who learned very quickly that there's nothing
sporting about war any longer, if indeed there ever was
an interesting read in that regard, if you ever read
Manfred von rich Toff and the Red Baron's autobiography, Um,
he talks about being in the first cavalry charges of

(01:02:32):
the war and very quickly being someone of Prussian descent
on the ability to do something different. He decides, Wow,
this isn't what I thought it was gonna be. I'm
gonna go join the air service, right, but it's a
really interesting um. The first couple of chapters of his
autobiography or very much about this is what I thought
I was going to see and this is what I
actually saw. Yeah, And it's it's a lot of people

(01:02:53):
were shocked, I think when they ran into the first fuselid,
a fully automatic fire. It's it's remarkable. And in terms
of like how recent a lot of this was, I
interviewed a man once who had he was fourteen when
World War ended, and in the Hitler Youth. He was
a German Man. His grandfather was a Prussian cavalryman who
had fought in the War of eighteen seventy and and

(01:03:16):
charged men on horseback with a sword. And I like,
I shook hands with this man who had shaken hands
with a man who fought on horseback with a saber
like that. It's it's not that far ago. It's not
that long ago that like that was war, um. And
it was Maxim's gun that had a major role in
why that seems like the fucking medieval days now? Yeah,

(01:03:37):
that in the aircraft, right, those are the two that
to me right off the bat changed everything so much
that the world was completely unrecognizable within two years. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's really it's something else. Um, Well, Carl, we've
got more to talk about another another guy who made
a gun and also a guy who we don't have
to do the whole Well, someone would have made it thing,
because absolutely no other fucking person would have made the

(01:03:59):
kind of happens this dude was obsessed with making. He's
a beautiful maniac. We will be talking about him in
part two, but for right now, Carl, do you have
any playables to plug? Uh? I mean, just my normal
thing I run in Range TV. You can find my content,
you can find all my different distribution points at enrange
dot tv. Um. I'm sometimes referred to as an alternative
voice in the firearms content creator community in that I'm

(01:04:23):
actually trying to be inclusive and believe that rights are
for everyone, up for a specific category of people, and
that makes you controversial in the firearms community. But if
that's your bag, come check me out at Enrange dot tv.
Definitely check Carl out at enranged TV. And um, you know,
get yourself a gatling gun. There's nothing stopping you. I
don't know, I don't know I was feeling. I mean,

(01:04:43):
if you're feeling a little colonial, you won't want to
maxim right, Or if you're feeling like world domination, maybe
some sort of tactical nuke. I mean, they'll probably available
on the market now, right, I mean fingers crossed. That
that would really make me feel a lot safer when
I go out to fred Meyer to to do my
grocery shopping. Well, I mean what I mean a minute,
man or two, just a couple of minute minute, you know,
like a dinger with them. What's more viable than a

(01:05:05):
personal's false defense item except like a little, tiny tactical
nuke on your belt. Look, if everybody had a tiny
tactical nuke, we would no longer have fist fights. Hey,
the only thing that stops the bad guy with a
nuke is a good guy with a new That's right,
That's right. Uh? That well, that was the story of
the cold for it was all right. Well that's all

(01:05:25):
for Part one. Part two Electric Boogaloo coming up.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Hiram Maxim, Inventor of the Machine-Gun and Curling Iron