A KICK THAT KILLED MILLIONS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 260, 13 April 1915, Page 3

A KICK THAT KILLED MILLIONS.

HOW SIR HIRAM MAXIM INVENTED HIS QUICK-FIRER. New ideas have always fascinated me (says Sir Hiram Maxim). As a boy my inventiveness displayed itself in the designing of mechanical toys, although it was not until some years after I hid reached my majority " that I became what I might term a eerious inventor. When I was twenty-five, liowrrer, I evolved an automatic gas-machine for lighting up isolated country houses. Then I turned my attention to electricity, and made dynamos and electcic lamps in the States. One day, however, a friend said to me, and I quote his ■words as near >m I can recollect them: "Maxim, if you wish to make a fortune, leave your electrical devices and invent a killing machine for the wars of the future."

I laughed, for my thoughts had never turned in that direction. A short time, afterwards, however, I happened to be! firing a military rifle, and remarked the powerful kick it gave. Thinking it over it occurred to me that. I might turn it to useful effect, for that kick seemed to me to be a waste of force, besides being a disturbing element in gunnery. Ultimately I conceived the idea of utilising this force for reloading and Bring. I came to London, established a little workshop, and made a gun fired and loaded itself by the energy derived from the recoil. It was a veritable nine days' wonder. Everyone of not?, including the late King Edward, came? to see me fire my gun. On one of the trials I fired 333 rounds in thirty-five seconds, and a belt of 2000 cartridges in slightly over three minutes.

A startling effect of this fearful speed was. that after the gun had ceased firing at fiOO yards as manv as forty reports could bo counted. This meant that at the instant of stopping the hist twenty shots were on their wav to the target at varying distances, and the icports of the previous twenty similarly on their wav back.

My first automatic gun was made at Hatton Garden, and the accounts of its extraordinary mechanism were at first received as a Yankee "tall" story. When however, the British Government gave me a big order, which enabled me to form a company and fit up large workshops, they realised that there wis something in my idea.

Briefly, the maxim-gun is a compromise between a rifle and a cannon. The barrel is made to move an inch or to backwards and forwards inside an outer Cfse filled with water, which prove its it becoming red hot. The recoil of the barrel and the extension of a compressed spring are made to do a number of operations, including ejecting the old cartridge shells, extracting a 'fresh c.irKdge f;om tlw lelt. racing it in t» chamber, pulling the. belt forward one place, cocking the hammer, and firing the cartridge. The operator has only to keep a button pressed with his thumbs, and the gun will spit out bullets at the maximum rate of ten per second as long as it is fed with ammunition. My gun was first used in the "British Army in the Matabele campaign, and I remember the havoc it caused among the j Zulus was such that it was discussed in Parliament as to kV.'Wi such a gin Was not outside legitimate warfare. It is a fact, by the way, o'f which few people are aware, that the invention of the maxim gun led to the inventing of smokeless powder. While 1 «-as making preliminary trials with gun I noticed the vast cloud of smoke produced, and Lord Wolsely said to me at the time that the gun would be of little use unless I could invent a smokeless powder. This I fully realised, and after a number of experiments I produced what I might term, without going ir.fo technical details, a compound of nitroglycerine and guncotton in threads, which gave off practically no smoke, and patented my invention in ISB7. It is a curious and interesting fact that, later on, the Government exports made a powder in the form of threads, Which had exactly the same appearance as that which I invented, the only difference being that the Government powder ■contained five per cent, of vaseline.