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Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim (5 February 1840 – 24 November 1916) was an American-born British inventor best known as the creator of the first automatic machine gun, the Maxim gun. [1] Maxim held patents on numerous mechanical devices such as hair-curling irons , a mousetrap , and steam pumps .
The Maxim gun is a recoil-operated machine gun invented in 1884 by Hiram Stevens Maxim.It was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world. [15]The Maxim gun has been called "the weapon most associated with imperial conquest" by historian Martin Gilbert, [16] and was heavily used by colonial powers during the "Scramble for Africa".
It was the first air-cooled Maxim gun, and the first with the mainspring inside the receiver casing. [4] At the time, it was the lightest machine gun in the world. Maxim hoped that cavalry units would appreciate the Extra Light gun for “hit and run” raids, for its light weight.
The Curtiss flights emboldened the Smithsonian to display the Aerodrome in its museum as "the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight". Fred Howard, extensively documenting the controversy, wrote: "It was a lie pure and simple, but it bore the imprimatur of the venerable Smithsonian and over the ...
Hiram Maxim originally designed the Pom-Pom in the late 1880s as an enlarged version of the Maxim machine gun.Its longer range necessitated exploding projectiles to judge range, which in turn dictated a shell weight of at least 400 grams (0.88 lb), as that was the lightest exploding shell allowed under the Saint Petersburg Declaration of 1868 and reaffirmed in the Hague Convention of 1899.
In 1884, Hiram Maxim patented a muzzle-cup system described in U.S. patent 319,596, though it is unknown if this firearm was ever prototyped. John Browning used gas trapped at the muzzle to operate a "flapper" in the earliest prototype gas-operated firearm described in U.S. patent 471,782 and used a slight variation of this design on the M1895 ...
Hiram Maxim (1840–1916), English creator of the Maxim gun; Hiram E. McCallum (1899–1989), mayor of Toronto from 1948 to 1951; Hiram McCreary, Canadian politician; Hiram McCullough (1813–1885), US Congressman; Hiram Z. Mendow (1894-2001), Al Capone's lawyer during his trial; Hiram Messenger, several people with this name
William Cantelo (born 1830) was a 19th-century British inventor. Credited with developing an early machine gun, he disappeared from his home in Southampton in the 1880s. . While trying to find Cantelo, his two sons saw a photograph of American-born inventor Hiram Maxim (born 1840), creator of the Maxim gun; his superficial similarity to their father led them to believe that he had re-emerged ...