WAR SECRET REFUSED.
HOW GERMAN'S WERE ABLE TO BATTER BELGIUM.
Mr. Hudson Maxim, inventor of smokeless powder and scores of other new materials and processes, visited London with his wife in January.
“I was last here in 1897,” he told a Daily Chronicle representative, “when 1 lectured at the Royal United Services Institution on a system I proposed for throwing high explosives, but the British Government did not adopt it. The new forts of Liege and Namur were being built at the time, and I showed how they could be destroyed. W[hen I got back to the United States I sold the formula for high explosive to our Government for £IO,OOO and the patent for the fuse for £20,000. The Germans adopted both ideas and used them with terrific effect at Liege.
“In my book, “Wlarfare of the Future,” you will find forecast the use of chrloriue gas and here is a picture showing a combat on the high seas between an underseas torpedoboat and battleships, which I predicted long before it was accepted as a possibility. People are so slow to take ui) new ideas. When I talked about the gun for throwing high explosives one English writer said it had been overdone and that if it could be England would have to cover her harbours with defensive roofings.” Mr. Maxim was born in obscurity and poverty, in a lonely and barren section of Maine and never knew the luxury of a pair of shoes util he was 13. He was once paid over £40,000 in cash by the De Pont Powder Company for a single invention. Another contribution to the science of war was just upon the point of completion when the armistice came. Mr. Maxim describes it as a seasledge, runnig at 70 miles an hour on the water, discharging its torpedo and stopping it own rush by recoil. At the outbreak of the war he was appointed a member of the Naval Construction Board of the United States, and invented a mechanical mine that would blow up a ship 75 feet distant without contact.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/MH19260318.2.2
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Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3012, 18 March 1926, Page 1
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348WAR SECRET REFUSED. Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3012, 18 March 1926, Page 1
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