Hiram Percy Maxim was born in Brooklyn in 1869, the son of the inventor of the first fully automatic machine gun and the nephew of a pioneer of smokeless explosives. He graduated from MIT in mechanical engineering at 17 in 1886 and worked for electric utilities in Boston. In 1892, at the American Projectile Company in Lynn, Massachusetts, he spent his nights building a gasoline engine from scratch, unaware of the German work of Benz and Daimler, and was repelled by the shaking, oil-spitting result. In 1895 he joined Colonel Albert Pope’s motor vehicle division in Hartford, Connecticut, served as an umpire at the Chicago Times-Herald race riding in the Electrobat 2, and in 1899 won what the episode calls the first closed-circuit automobile race in the United States in a gasoline Pope Columbia.
He then applied one principle to two machines: baffled chambers that let hot, high-pressure gas cool and expand before reaching open air. The result was a firearm silencer, patented in 1909, and automobile mufflers, which is why many English-speaking countries still call mufflers silencers. In 1914 he co-founded the American Radio Relay League with Clarence Tuska, organizing amateur operators to pass messages station to station across the continent. Later he joined the Amateur Cinema League in 1926 and in 1933 published Life’s Place in the Cosmos on extraterrestrial life. In February 1936, traveling by train to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, he fell ill and died in La Junta, Colorado, on February 17, aged 66.
- He operated a huge rotary spark gap transmitter he nicknamed Old Betsy.
- His call sign, W1AW, became the headquarters call sign of the ARRL.
- He married Josephine Hamilton in 1898 and had a son and a daughter.
- His daughter, Percy Maxim Lee, led the League of Women Voters for eight years in the 1950s and sat on President Kennedy’s Consumer Advisory Council.
- In 1955 Percy Maxim Lee testified before the U.S. Senate, pushing back against Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Leave a Reply