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Sir Hiram Maxim: mouse traps and machine guns

When you think of Camden's Hatton Garden, you think of diamonds and jewellery. But the street has another distinction. In the 1880's prolific American inventor Sir Hiram Maxim designed and built the first machine guns there, fearsome new weapons that could fire three hundred rounds and more per minute. Less earth-shatteringly, Sir Hiram is also credited with inventing an automatic re-setting mouse trap.

Sir Hiram was born in 1840 in Sangerville, Maine and is said to have had a penchant for all things mechanical even as a child. He worked as a carriage builder, a mechanical draftsman and an instrument-maker then rose to be the Chief Engineer of the First Electric Lighting Company. His inventions included a curling iron, devices to prevent the rolling of ships, eyelet and riveting machines, bombs for aircraft, smokeless powder, an aerial torpedo gun, and a coffee substitute.

He moved to London in 1881, employed by the United States Electric Lighting Company. In the same year he went to the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition where he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. An apocryphal story has it that he met a man at the Exhibition who told him that a quick and easy way to make money would be to invent a machine that allowed the Europeans to kill each other in large numbers.

The first machine gun was developed at a small factory at the end of Hatton Garden, now called Kovacs House - there you can see the blue plaque, pictured left. Maxim refined a single-barrelled gun which could fire anything between 300 and 500 rounds per minute, depending on which authority on the subject you trust. The photograph above shows a demonstration of the gun with Sir Hiram in the centre wearing a top hat.

The defining characteristic of the gun was that the recoil force of each shot was used to eject the spent cartridge and load the next one. This is the same principle that modern automatic and semi-automatic weapons work depend on. The enterprise rapidly outgrew the Hatton Garden premises and Maxim moved the operation to Crayford in 1884.

The British Army adopted the Maxim machine gun in 1889 and it had its first serious taste of action in the 1893 Matabele War in what is now Zimbabwe. In one battle, fifty soldiers were able to defeat 5,000 Matabele warriors with four of Maxim's guns. Other military powers quickly saw the value of this indutrialisation of war and the gun, or guns based on Maxim's original, was soon in service throughout the world.

Since Maxim died in 1916, he was not to see the terrible carnage that marked the 1914-18 World War in which untold thousands died under fire from the by then commonplace machine gun.