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Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. Yeah. This is Our American Stories. And up next, our regular contributor, Ashley Lubinsky, who's the former co-host of the Discovery Channel's Master of Arms. She's the former curator in charge of the Cody Firearms Museum and is a co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's Firearms Research Center.
Here's Ashley. Most people recognize the name Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim for his invention of the machine gun.
However, I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that his story is so much more than just that one invention. During his life, Maxim held over 140 patents, including those for curling irons, mouse straps, steam pumps, powered flight, and even the first automatic fire sprinkler. But the most random of them all is his claim to have invented the light bulb. If you know your traditional American history, then you know. Or, I guess, think that you know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, and he had this back-and-forth rivalry with Nikola Tesla.
However, that's only part of the story. And that happens so often. It's so much easier to make one person the hero in the story when in reality there were a lot of players. But this story is so interesting, I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more press. And that was that there was a feud between Hiram Stevens Maxim and Thomas Edison, which, at least for Maxim, verged on levels of obsession.
Maxim was born on February 5th, 1840 in Maine. And as a teenager, he worked in a lot of different fields, including machine work, which is why he's so eclectic in his inventions. But as kind of a random tangent, Maxim did invent two types of inhalers for a range of sinus-related illnesses. He suffered from a lot of sinus-related illnesses, including hay fever, which was kind of in its infancy during this time frame in America as the country became more urbanized. But in response to these criticisms of these inventions, he once stated, It will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.
Maxim though, and what perhaps should have been his claim to fame, was the fact that he developed and installed the first electric lights in a New York City building, the Equitable Life Building. And Maxim was a driving force in the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, which is a pretty well-known company in American history. But of course, if you read your childhood textbooks, you would assume that the first person was Thomas Edison. And in fact, they were actually kind of.
All inventing around the same time. And they had several patent disputes, which was a common occurrence in the 19th century, especially in the latter half of the 19th century. One of the biggest disputes that they had was that Maxim held 17 patents on incandescent lamps, and that's one of the things that he's most well known for. And one of those big fights was around one of those patents. And according to Maxim, Edison should only be credited with its invention because he knew patent law better than Maxim.
And according to Maxim, you always gotta say according to Maxim because he was an eccentric and maybe he's lying, maybe he's not, I don't know. But what he said was that he had an employee who went behind his back and patented the invention under his own name.
So the patent wasn't under Maxim's name. And according to Maxim, Edison found out about this and was able to prove that the invention was false because it was falsely reported under somebody's name. And what happens when a patent is basically rendered null and void is it becomes public property. And now that it's public property, somebody else can take that design and patent it.
So you've got Maxim saying that the only reason that Edison is a big deal and had kind of similar inventions was because he got off on a technicality. He was able to invalidate Maxim's patent and then be able to capitalize and take it for his own. But of course. Edison completely disagrees and called Maxim's light bulb a clean steal of his own lamp. Maxim believed that he was the inventor of the commercial light bulb and Needless to say He was really perturbed.
That nobody ever really gave him credit.
So, if you think nobody gave him credit today, they weren't giving him credit back then either. And he was quoted to say: Every time I put up a light, a crowd would gather, everyone asking, Is it Edison's? And Maxim claimed that Edison had never made a lamp like that, and he considered killing on the spot the next person to ask him if his invention belonged to Edison's. To be fair though, things are always more complicated that, and 40 years before Edison's prototype, people were experimenting with this technology, so maybe the Maxim-Edison feud is kind of moot. But at the time, many would remark that Maxim's light bulbs were far superior to Edison's.
Edison's light bulbs couldn't tolerate as high of a current as Maxim's, so the light was dimmer and they burned out a lot faster. And this feud between the two, though, would continue to the point where executives for the U.S. Electric Lighting Company would basically like push Maxim out of the way and give him. Tasks that were not necessarily important to the company to keep him busy, which allowed him to continue to be more and more angry about this rivalry, but not actually affect the day-to-day of the company. And Maxim does move to England and he starts working on his machine gun.
I don't know if he ever really gets over this, but he certainly kind of holds this grudge for the rest of his life. And One of the reasons that people say Moxum kind of lost out was that he didn't have the same self-promotion abilities that Edison had, which I feel like you hear so often throughout history. But maximum Would end up doing just fine, and he would go on to invent one of the most revolutionary weapon systems in history. But this. Eccentricity that kind of chased his whole life continued to follow him wherever he went.
After moving to England, a family with the last name Cantello would claim that Maxim was their long-lost father, William, who went missing years prior and who. They claimed, also invented the machine gun.
So he goes over to England, his life doesn't get much better than that. He's now considered this other person that was born in England and, according to the family's investigation, ended up in America. And then there'd be these really weird conversations about teleportation and the belief that he could move back and forth like that. It was all quite a mess, and Maxim definitely fed into a lot of that, even though he denied being these people's father for his whole life. He would also get lumped into several bigamy charges back in the United States and possibly had an illegitimate son, which is separate from his inventor son that many know, Hiram Percy Maxim, who's an inventor in his own right.
But I think my favorite story of his eccentricity is not. The bigamy is not this weird conspiracy theory, is not his weird obsession with Thomas Edison, but is something as simple as later in his life he was arrested for shooting pea shooters at Salvation Army workers. There's a long history of firearms inventors inventing mainstream technologies that we associate with other individuals today. One of the biggest ones that people talk about are the firearms industry connections to the automobile industry, with Colton Winchester creating inline manufacturing processes that were then adapted by Henry Ford. But it's possible that Maxim and his light bulb is one that is As significant and probably more obfuscated than other kinds of mainstream inventions that were made by originally gun manufacturers.
But despite Maxim's desire, almost extreme lengths of desire for everyone to know him for his light bulb, it was ultimately the machine gun that became his legacy. And all that drama that preceded and followed were washed away by a weapon used in war for well over a century. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Ashley Lubinsky. She's the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms.
She's the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's Firearms Research Center. And my goodness, Maxim was indeed an eccentric, from teleportation to the bigamy charges, well on and on. But in the end, Thomas Edison had this real talent for self-promotion. But in the end, this Maxim character was just that. 140 patents.
In the end, what he's most known for is that machine gun. The story of Hiram Maxim, the inventor, maybe, maybe not, of the incandescent light bulb here on Our American Stories. The countdown is on for the 2026 NFL Draft presented by Bud Light. Catch all seven rounds three days live from Pittsburgh, April 23rd through 25th. Watch every pick live on NFL Network, ESPN, and ABC.
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