Behind the Bastards - Hiram Maxim, Inventor of the Machine-Gun and Curling Iron

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Robert is joined by Karl Kasarda to discuss Hiram Maxim.FOOTNOTES: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160317-the-man-who-tried-to-make-a-supergun-for-saddam-hussein https://archive.fo/nruk https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Gerald_Bull https://bartonchronicle.com/exhibit-brings-gerald-bull-back-light/ https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/26/magazine/the-man-behind-iraq-s-supergun.html https://opac.navalmarinearchive.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=15167 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/02/10/the-guns-of-saddam/e31bbb3a-52c3-4f29-bc47-cca57a80b6db/ https://headstuff.org/culture/history/hiram-maxim-engineer-death/ https://www.americanheritage.com/hiram-maxim#2 https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/26/science/100-years-of-maxim-s-killing-machine.html http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Documents/People%20-%20Maxim%20HS.htm https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/america-s-first-hiram-maxim-s-heavy-machine-gun/ https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi694.htm https://rar.rutgers.edu/whatever-happens-we-have-got-the-maxim-and-they-have-not-the-conspicuous-absence-of-machine-guns-in-british-imperialist-imagery-by-ramey-mize/ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t8sb3zd8j&view=1up&seq=42&skin=2021 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's shooting? What's shooting? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we ask, what is shooting? Here with us today to answer that question, Carl Casarta of InRangeTV. Carl, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Do you like the NPR voice I did at the end there, kind of trying to professionalize it a little bit? Yeah, I know it really takes this topic and makes it feel very, you know, astute and erudite. So I'm excited about this. Carl, you are like me, very interested in firearms. You are professionally interested in firearms, unlike me, because I'm just a little bit of a hack and a fraud. And for InRangeTV, you do all sorts of videos on different kinds of weapons

historic. You've got a room full of historic guns that I'm looking at right now. I'm extremely jealous of your collection. It looks wonderful. Carl, how are you feeling today? Feeling pretty good. Today's a pretty good day. You know, today is actually the day we're recording this. In 1929, Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles, California. And he, of course, is the prototype for the thin blue line police brutality we have today. So hooray. Yeah, good for that. And today, we're not going to be talking thin blue line stuff today. Although, you know, there might be a couple of shades of that. But we are going to be talking about, we're going to be talking about some gun related bastards, which I thought I would have you on for. And the first bastard we're going

to talk about is a little fellow you may have heard of, called Hiramaxum. Now, what do you know about Mr. Maxim? I know that he had designed the belt fed water cooled machine gun that every side of World War One used to mow each other's children down with. Yeah, he is. Why? Europe is no longer the economic center of the world in a lot of ways. There were other factors, but Mr. Maxim played a role in that for sure. Now, obviously, both of us are very much into firearms as a hobby. I don't consider someone a bastard just because they make a gun or really necessarily another kind of weapon system. I do think there are certain weapons systems like cluster bombs that you kind of have to be a piece of shit to design. But as a general rule, a gun is a tool,

and there's nothing inherently immoral about designing a tool. That said, it's probably fair to note that within the industry of people who design things for the purpose of killing, there's probably a higher proportion of bastards than in a lot of fields of industrial design. And we are going to talk today about two of the greatest gun makers in human history. This week, about two of the greatest gun makers in human history, both of whom were not very pleasant people. And as I just stated, Hiram Stevens Maxim is our subject today. Now, Hiram was born on February 5, 1840 in Sangersville, Maine. He wrote a biography later in life, the bulk of which is a mix of lies and angry rants about people he'd argued with. Like it's essentially at the very end of his life,

he drops like the old time equivalent of a mixtape yelling at all of the people who he had had fights with over the course of his career in the gun industry. And a lot of it's like very technical stuff that I can't tell you who actually invented the light bulb, for example, which is a major thing in his. Did you actually know much about Maxim in his career before making the machine gun? Honestly, no, I don't. I mean, I'm very familiar with the gun, obviously, or the machine gun and how it revolutionized and changed warfare. But as for the individual himself, no, I'm not not really familiar with his life. Well, he was a really interesting guy. He's one of these dudes that is just a compulsive inventor. Like one of those people who and it's this this fascinating

period, the 1800s is this moment where it's also really easy to be an inventor because like industrial like tooling and machining and whatnot has hit this this level of professionalization and suddenly all sorts of things are possible. And if you're into inventing, there's a lot, there's a number of dudes like Maxim who just over the course of their life, invent like 60 things that everybody uses today. And it's Maxim's one of those people. And he's he's a particularly interesting example on it. Now, in his biography, which is again, not a super reliable text, he provides some thoughts on his family background that I find interesting. And I'm going to read a paragraph from that now. This is him describing his ancestors. The ancestors of the Maxim family were French Huguenots.

They were driven out of France and settled in Canterbury, England, from which place they immigrated to Plymouth County, Massachusetts, where, quote, they could worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience and prevent others from doing the same. And prevent others from doing the same. Yeah, that's very fun. Yeah, that's that's fun. I'm going to find my freedom so I can use it as a wrench against others. Such a common trend. Yeah. Yeah. And Maxim is being pretty self aware here. He is not that kind. He's not a particularly religious man ever. He famously is more or less an atheist until he goes to Russia to sell the machine guns and they won't let him talk to the czar unless he has a religion. So he's like, I guess I'm Protestant.

Better pick the right one. Yeah. They didn't care. You just couldn't be a pagan walking up to the czar, I guess. So, yeah, most of the sources you'll find will note that his father was a sheep farmer and very poor. This is technically accurate, but I think it's accurate in a way that gives readers an incorrect idea about Hiram's upbringing. Within his autobiography, he describes his family as being comparatively well off. They just didn't have any money because no one really had money at the time and place where he lived. They're not poor. Money is not a meaningful fact of life for people living in the wilderness of Maine in the 1840s. You don't do a lot of spending and stuff. They live in this kind of community that's pretty

spread out and sprawling. They were very self sufficient. They bartered and traded with the people in their community for the things they couldn't produce on their own. They were the kind of people who maybe a couple of times a year, they would go into a bigger town and sell some products and use them to buy a thing or two, and they would have money for that kind of brief period of time. But money's not – they're not poor. They just don't have money. Does that make sense, that kind of person? We don't really have those people anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm sure there are some places in the world that have some subsistence like that, but the reality is if you're self-sufficient, you don't really need an Amazon Prime account at that

point. You just do your thing. You go out. You get your milk. You harvest your beef from your cows or whatever, and you're good to go. That makes sense. Yeah. So a lot of kind of popular sources on it will say that he grew up poor. He doesn't seem to have considered himself poor. He's like, well, we had everything we needed. We just like – why would we have needed money at that point? So yeah, at no point in his childhood does Hiram seem to have considered himself poor, and their community was close to a group of indigenous Americans living in a small village nearby. Hiram's autobiography is filled with the same kind of casual racism you would expect from a book written by a man who grew up in the 1840s, but it's also not – he's not hateful

in it. And in fact, there's a number of times where he will note stuff that the way that the natives had positioned their village was a lot smarter than how the white people had put their houses because it was more protected from rain and it got better sunlight. So he was somebody who was definitely possessed of the bigotry of his time, but was also capable of looking at what these people were doing and recognizing that they understood the environment better and were making smarter choices about it, which he appreciated because he's got this kind of mechanical mind, right? Like he's somebody who thinks a lot about efficiency, and he notes that their lives are a lot more efficient than ours because they understand the area a lot better.

There's a point in his childhood where like he and his father take advice from a local chief they're friendly with on how to trap and prepare different animals. More than anything, they hunted black bear, which a lot of his early memories are like hunting black bear with his dad. And their community was the kind of place that – there's a story he tells where he and his dad are out in the field and they see a black bear, so they run back to their house for a gun, only to find that one of their neighbors had spotted the bear, gone into their house, grabbed their rifle and taken it out to go shoot the bear. So it's like that kind of community, you know? Not only do people not lock their doors, people feel fine grabbing like

their neighbor's gun to go shoot a bear if they see one, which is also not a very common thing today, I don't think. I've lived out in the sticks a lot of my life, but I have not had that kind of relationship with my neighbors. Yeah, I live in a rural area as well, and I don't have that relationship either, but at the same time, we live in a world saturated with the idea that we know – we technically in theory, quote by quote, know so many people that we really don't, but I think it's changed the nature of how people live. Yeah, definitely reading his recollections of his childhood, I'm like, well, aspects of this seem kind of nice. This like, all you worry about is like producing what you need to survive,

and that's kind of this – it doesn't seem like a bad childhood is what I will say about it. Now, we did a recent episode where we talked about Melville Dewey that'll be launching either before or right after this one. Dewey, who invents the Dewey Decimal System and hear him grow up in kind of a similar time and a similar place, and the part of the Northeast they grow up and is commonly known as the burned over district. And it's known that way because there's a shitload of different social and religious extremists, like Protestant kind of movements that are swelling up and going – swarming throughout the country during this period of time. And hear him – or was very aware of these kind of evangelical movements and the influence they

were having on the culture, and he was not positive towards them. Neither was his family. And I'm going to read a long excerpt from his autobiography here because I think it's interesting, and it gets you into this guy's head because he is in a very and extremely religious part of the United States, and it is absolutely not something that he takes on in any sort of way. Quote, there have been several epidemics of Millerites in the state of Maine, sometimes called second adventists or world burners. These are seventh day adventists, or what becomes that. On one occasion, having ascertained by diligent search in the Bible the exact day, hour, and minute that the world would come to an end, the saints disposed of their property. Some failed to plant their crops,

as they had enough to last until the fatal day. When everything was in readiness for the final end of all things, which was fixed for a certain day in February, there was a lot of snow on the ground. Some of the saints took great care to have their watches and clocks corrected, so as to know the exact minute the final crash would come. The hour fixed was about nine o'clock at night, and most of the women appeared in their ascension robes. The saints met at a place called Gilman's Corner, in front of Gilman's little store. Some repairs had recently been made to the roof, and a ladder was still in position. A few minutes before the final send-off, an old and very fat woman climbed up the ladder, got onto the ridge pole, and walked forward to the end of the

roof. She stood there, with her arms extended in her ascension robes, fluttering in the wind like a pair of wings. One of the saints had his watch out, and called off the time as it passed, and when the exact minute arrived, the old lady on the roof started to fly. She gave a jump and landed in a big pile of snow, which had a decidedly cooling effect, and knocked every particle of superstition out of her. She never had a relapse. There was no one in the state of Maine that ridiculed this movement with more reason and vigor than my gifted mother. She had a lot of brains in the top and in the front of her head, and made the best use of them. So that's his, how he feels about this kind of, this religious movement that sweeps through the country when

he's a little kid. I find that fascinating. Yeah, as an engineer, a person that was clearly going to become a creator and an engineer and a stem-minded person, seems like very often we don't see those types of things coexist. Someone that's very scientific or technical or engineering-minded tends to not be very superstitious and vice versa. They can be together, but mostly you don't see them together. Yeah, and it's interesting. He kind of, his family seems to be very much opposed to this. They're very practical people, and he's kind of influenced. He definitely grows up with this kind of very skeptical attitude about everyone around him, which will kind of become more of a factor in his personality as he gets older. But he grows up curious about the world, a fairly

open-minded person for his day. When he was 14 years old, he was apprenticed to a carriage maker, where he learned the basics of engineering skills that would define his adult life. His first invention came shortly thereafter, when he was working in a mill with a terrific mouse problem. Hiram set to work on his own and designed an automatic mousetrap, which was so successful that he was eventually able to patent it. Many mousetraps today are based off of his design. So like, there's still mousetraps that are based off the one he designed when he's like 14 years old. Very smart kid. And he's effectively an adult at 14, right? That's a kid today. And like Germany in this period of time, you are legally an adult at 14. And it's pretty much the

same where Maxim grows up. He's working full time at this point. He's making a man's wages, and he's inventing a lot of shit. He designs in his late teen years a silicate blackboard in order to make sketching out plans for other inventions easier. And he markets that a bit. And the older adults around him recognize that he's kind of a genius. When he's 24, his uncle Levi hires him to work as an engineer in Abington, Massachusetts. And his uncle gives his nephew freedom to think and experiment, which Hiram did until two years later. He invented the curling iron. He received his patent in 1866. And this is the first one he gets. He's also the inventor of the curling iron. The guy who made the same dude invented the machine gun and

the curling iron. So now we can do our beauticians and we're getting rid of mice in our house. All courtesy of Maxim. Thank you so much. I can blame him for the permanent scar I have from a curling iron. I touched when I was like seven. So yeah, my favorite meme, the two hands shaking in the middle is Sophie and millions of dead European boys and meeting in the middle at angry at Hiram Maxim. That's us with a bunch of mice at the bottom. So young Maxim was off to the races now. He designed an automated sprinkler system soon after, but he struggled to find investors for this product. We've talked about some like industrial fires in this period. Folks are not convinced that they need sprinklers or any kind

of fire safety whatsoever in this period of time. Well, the children workers are easily replaceable. Yeah, there's a ton of kids. You mean to put sprinklers in? So yeah, he can't really find any investors for this. And he fails to convince any moneymen that there was a future in the idea, but he does draw interest from one wealthy backer, Spencer D. Schuyler. Now, Schuyler is not really interested in selling his sprinkler system. He just sees that Maxim is extremely gifted and is like, well, I want to hire this kid and profit off of his ideas. Now, this was an era in which electricity had become enough of a thing that people knew any day now somebody was going to make a light bulb that people wanted in their homes,

right? There are light bulbs at this point. None of the people involved in the story about to tell invented the first light bulb, but like they're not good. They blow up their fire hazards. They're not really a thing you would want in your house. So it's this kind of thing where people are trying to figure out how to do a light bulb well. And everyone knows it's going to happen. It just hasn't quite happened yet, right? Like, and there's kind of a race, right? All of these different, a lot of money, Edison is putting a lot of money into like, because everyone knows like, as soon as we figure this shit out, it's going to be huge, you know, artificial light anytime a day or night. That's a big deal, a lot of money in that idea. So Schuyler wanted in on that cash

and he formed the US Electric Lighting Company with the aim of being first to market. He made the young Hera Maxim his chief engineer. Now, the story that follows is very messy. And a little beyond our scope today, the short version is that Maxim worked alongside a guy named William Sawyer. Sawyer was an inventor and is probably the man who created the incandescent electric lamp, the first good light bulb that you could like. Again, like the Sawyer is probably the guy who figures this out first. But this is very messy because Edison also around the same time his people come out and there's a series of lawsuits over this. And Sawyer wins most of the lawsuits with Edison over the invention of the light bulb. Again, he's probably the guy you would credit with this.

He's also kind of a sketchy character himself in 1880. He shot a doctor in the face during an argument about their wives. So like he is a messy fellow. And for the rest of his life, Sawyer and Hiram worked together at this company. For the rest of his life, Hiram would argue that he was the inventor of the first incandescent electric lamp, or at least he claimed to have solved the problems that made Sawyer's lamp possible. Now, he never names Sawyer in his autobiography, probably because he was scared of getting sued. But he does go into a lot of detail about the fact that his partner who he calls Mr. D was a nearly useless alcoholic. And I feel the need to read an extensive quote from his autobiography here. Because again, this is like the guy who

probably invented the first electric incandescent lamp and Maxim is so jealous about him that he has to turn him into like a fucking goblin in his autobiography. And I'm going to read a quote from that now. I found a very curious state of affairs in Mr. Schuyler's office. He had in his employee a large clumsy, brutal looking fellow, clean shaven, who we will call Mr. D. He was said to be an expert electrician and telegraph operator, but he was a great drunkard, being comfortably corned all the time. I had not heard that description of drunk. I think we should bring that back. You want to get corned? Let's go get corned. Yeah. The next day, he told me that he was a great believer in the future of electric lighting, that he was the first in the field,

and that if I would take hold in a system, he would give me a salary of $10 a day, as well as a quarter interest in whatever might accrue from the work. This was an exceedingly good offer, especially as I had complete charge of the place. He informed all the men that I had been put in charge, and the first thing I did was have a talk with Mr. D. I told him that it was not quite the thing to have Brandy brought into the place several times a day and to keep drinking it while at his desk. I assured him that there was a great deal more nourishment and a pint of milk than in a gallon of Brandy, and advised him strongly to try milk. The next day, he provided himself with a two quart tin pail, and his brother was sent out two or three times for milk.

Mr. D said the change was a good one, and he felt much better for it. Shortly after, I learned that the so-called milk was just about half Brandy, and that the fellow was still in a half drunken condition all day. I have no idea if that's true. I was going to say, did he just invent the Brandy milk punch? He may have. It's possible that Maxim is just lying because he's jealous. It's also possible that Maxim is telling the truth. This guy was a raging drunk, and he still was invented the first incandescent electric lamp. I just find that very funny. And also, I have trouble thinking of a more disgusting drink combination than Brandy milk. That doesn't sound good to me. I think it's okay. I don't know. I like a white Russian, but Brandy and milk? Just straight Brandy and milk.

Well, let's just go get corn, and we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll get corn. Maybe I'd throw like a coffee liqueur in there or something. That changes everything. Yeah, that would. I wonder if it curdles. Anyway, so whatever the precise truth about Sawyer and his level of drunkenness, by 1881, Hiram was a powerful and respected engineer in his own right. They don't beat Edison, but they make a bunch of electric lamps that are good for industrial and entertainment lighting, and they make a bunch of money. They're selling lights all over the goddamn place. So they made the Betamax of lights. Yeah. I think it works a little better than that. Oh, unless you're a Betamax supremacist. No, I'm not. I'm not.

Sitting underneath one of your antique rifles is a Betamax. Yeah, I watch all my video in Betamax. So 1881, he goes to the Paris Exposition. Now, we talked about in our Basil Zaharoff episodes, where we're talking about like the birth of the arms industry in its modern form. These expositions are where a lot of that happens, and they're not just about weapons, right? Every kind of a lot of shit's being invented. There's combines and electric lights and all sorts of shit there. But the most popular things are always weapons, right? Because human beings are human beings, and people are not that interested in new fucking tractors.

But if somebody makes a new gun, everybody's going to be like, well, I want to look at that, motherfucker. And this is where like we talk about the crops. This is like these are the same places where like Alfred Krupp is putting his cannons out and the like. So 1881, Hiram goes to Europe for the Paris Exposition. His company had made a bunch of fancy new lighting equipment to show off, and he was basically running their booth. This was a very important job, but Hiram's interest had already started to drift away from lighting. Now, the story that comes next may be apocryphal. I did not find it in his autobiography, but every write-up you ever find, if you're a maxim, will include this story. I don't know if it actually happened. I think Hiram

said it happened at some occasions. It seems a little bit like anyway, I'll just tell you the story. While he's at this, this exposition, he's friends with an American and they're having a conversation about like the exposition and the different inventions there. And his friend says to him, hang your chemistry and electricity. If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable those Europeans to cut each other's throats with greater facility. And that is supposedly what gets him to start working on the maxim gun. And if that's true, it does say a lot about him that somebody's like, you know, you make a lot of money helping Europeans murder each other. And he's like, absolutely. Wasn't wrong. Wasn't wrong. Not at all wrong.

Makes me think of all Ron Hubbard, where they had the bed about how to make a bunch of money, invent religion. In this instance, make something to kill Europeans, kill each other. Yeah. Yeah. And he decides to do this. Now, there's another possibly apocryphal story to explain his how he gets the idea of how to make the maximum gun, which is that he's out hunting with like his family when he's a little kid and he tries to fire. It's usually said as a rifle. I don't know if it's a rifle or a shotgun or something, but he tries to fire a gun that's too powerful to him because he's little and it knocks him down. And this is what gives him the idea to make the thing that made the maximum gun so revolutionary is that it used the recoil. And

obviously, you know this, but for the listeners, it used the recoil of firing around to advance the next round. And that's why it's automatic, right? And that had not been done. There was no fully automatic weapons in that way at the time that were actually like worked very well. I don't know that I believe it, you know, he knocks himself down. And that's what gives him the idea whether or not it's true. If you're an engineering minded person, it's not hard to notice that like, oh, every time I shoot a gun at recoils and this energy is just wasted, right? Like there's all this energy that I'm not, we're not doing anything with like, and as an efficiency minded person, I have no trouble seeing how here I'm could be like, I got to find some way to tap into

to make use of that. Now at the time, the closest thing we had to a machine gun was the Gatling gun. And the Gatling gun, they're actually not legally that difficult to get in a lot of the US today because they're not legally automatic because you don't pull a trigger and fire them. It's crank operated. Right. The legal definition of a machine gun is to fire more than one round per press of the trigger. Yeah. And the Gatling gun does not do that. Yeah. So you could go get a Gatling gun right now, listeners, if you want to defend your stagecoach. I don't know what a Gatling gun would be useful for in a modern context. You could conceal, carry it to go to the Walgreens and pick up your prescription. It's a dangerous world. Put a pistol brace on a Gatling

gun. So the Gatling gun was pretty good at what it did for the time, right? Like if you're in a world where there's not even a whole lot of semi automatic weapons and some other fuckers got a Gatling gun, that can be a pretty potent tool. It has its uses. But it is not, we would not call it today a good weapon. It's very heavy. It's not easy to use. It is extremely prone to failure. And they're very hard to mass produce due in part to the fact that it's got a shitload of barrels, right? And because it has a shitload of barrels, it's much easier. It's actually much easier for a gun with a shitload of barrels to get way too hot than the gun that Maxim makes. Maxim's gun has one barrel, but it's water cool. There's a big jacket around it that they fill with. I think

it's like a gallon of water. And it turns out that's a much better way to stop a barrel from melting as quickly than just having like eight barrels on a rotating gun. So Maxim's gun is like, it's like going from, it's like everybody had a go cart and he pulls up in like a Toyota Hilux. Like it's just so much better than what it existed before. One of the things that's probably important to know is that Gatling guns, most of them at about 200 rounds a minute was the rate of fire, which seemed huge for the day. The Maxim gun could fire 600 rounds a minute. And that's like the first version. It actually gets a lot faster. I think they get up to like 1,000 rounds a minute. But it just blows every other machine type gun that exists at the time.

And there's a number, there's like volley guns. People have all sorts of different ways. They tried to make a weapon that could suppress people by shooting a bunch of bullets. Maxim's is just like, there's not even a comparison to what came before. Yeah. And then when you said like with the water cooling properly set up in a position when you have a water tank to the left or right of it with a hose going into it, it evaporates and the evaporative water from the heat of the machine gun goes back into a condenser and you can actually keep a maximum machine gun firing essentially in perpetuity. Yeah. As long as there's bullets, like keep it going. If you've got bullets in water, you can keep shooting. Yeah. Which come World War One. That's exactly what will happen.

Yeah. It's a remarkable device. Now, Maxim immediately dubbed his new weapon once they had tested it out, a daisy. And he's set to work putting it in front of representatives of several European governments. He starts trying to sell this to anyone who will buy it. The British are very impressed by this and they give Maxim his first order. So he founds the Maxim machine gun company in London. But after this first big get, he has this like really impressive start, but then no one else has interested in the thing, right? Like he just can't find buyers. There's a number of reasons we'll talk about for this. Part of it is because Maxim winds up in a conflict with Bastard's Pod alumni, Basil Zaharoff, who was kind of like one of the dudes who invents

the military industrial complex. Basil is an arms dealer at this point and he initially dedicates himself to stamping out the Maxim gun because it's bad for his profits. I'm going to read a quote from American Heritage Magazine here. Maxim soon found that it was one thing to build a machine gun and quite another to sell it. When he tried to peddle his weapon to the European powers, he discovered they preferred the Nordenfelt machine gun. Even by the standards of the 1880s, the Nordenfelt was primitive, but its makers had one great commercial advantage, Basil Zaharoff, a mysterious East European who was the best armed salesman in the world, suave, persuasive, and utterly ruthless. Zaharoff's shadowed Maxim around Europe,

telling would-be buyers that the superb new weapon was the work of a Yankee philosophical instrument maker who painstakingly made each gun to measurements of the utmost accuracy. One hundredth part of a millimeter here or there and it will not work. Do you expect you could get an army of Boston philosophical instrument makers to work them? So that's Zaharoff's like tactic. He's not saying it's a bad gun. He's being like, well, it's too good a gun. You can't train your like these bumfuck infantrymen you have to actually operate this thing. Like it's way too smart for them. They're going to break it. Which is a smart way. Like anyone who sees it knows it's a good gun. So that's how you convince them it's a bad thing to buy. When Malifluous lying failed, Zaharoff

bribed officials to buy the Nordenfelt. When bribery failed, he sabotaged Maxim's guns on the eve of their demonstration. Finally, Maxim merged with the Nordenfelt company. But even with the indefatigable Zaharoff now on his side, he found the going rough. Many countries were suspicious of the revolutionary weapon. And others simply didn't care. One Turkish official waved Maxim aside saying, invent a new vice for us and we will receive you with open arms. That is what we want. And you do find that line in his autobiography, whether or not it's apocryphal, I don't know, but he was really ahead of the game. No one people couldn't. He was envisioning something that these people couldn't comprehend you. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of resistance. He tries

to sell this to the United States and the war department doesn't want the thing. We think it's seen as unworthy by military standards. And there's this, you see this again when there starts to be this move to like give infantrymen semi-automatic and automatic weapons where it's like, they're just going to waste the ammo. Like this isn't going to help anything out. They're just going to like ruin our supply lines and run through bullets too quickly. There's this, you know, these old kind of like military brass types don't really see how much this is going to change the nature of conflict. There are some guys who do, but the people who are making purchasing decisions in the United States are like, absolutely not. We don't want these fucking

things, which is, man, it says a lot that Americans are turning down a gun like this about like just how stuck in their ways they are. Somebody like, yeah. And perhaps the machine done would have remained a curiosity, something large mustache general scoffed at as they drank brandy in their war tents before ordering bayonet charges. But the British were more far-sighted than most. Not all of them. There's a lot of resistance in the British military towards adopting the Maxim gun. But there are guys who see the use that this thing is going to have not to fight European wars, but to help them police their enormous colonial empire. Because the British at this point control more of the world than damn near anyone has ever controlled.

And there's not a lot of fucking British people, right? They don't have all that many soldiers. You know, many, you know, many more boars per minute you can kill with a machine gun. Yeah. Yeah. A lot. Seriously. Yeah. You need to do an ad break real quick. Right. You know, who else killed a lot of boars? I've been just laughing at who it could possibly be that pops up. This podcast is entirely supported by Lord Kitchener. Oh, okay. Yeah. So go occupy maficking and listen to these ads. That was a Boer war joke for all of you sitting at home.

For the empire. Yeah, whatever. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. Right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives

a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good badass way. It's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. So, uh, yeah, the British, some guys in the British Army see the Max and Ben is like, well, this is a thing that could actually help us deal with the manpower shortages we have. And the fact that like this, the scramble for Africa is happening in this period, they've massively expanded their holdings. And this is also a period where kind of early on in the European occupation,

they have this shock and awe thing because their weaponry is a lot better than what's available on the continent to the indigenous people. That's starting to change by the late 1800s. Indigenous resistance in Africa in this period isn't mostly like dudes with, you know, the very like kind of stereotypical images of guys with like shields and spears charging volleys of gunfire. It's insurgents with rifles like they have rifles now and their resistance is starting to get a lot more effective. So while European weaponry had initially represented a titanic advantage, that started to turn in this period. Africans have a lot more access to guns and enough time has passed that different groups have developed an understanding of European combat tactics and how to disrupt

and counter them. This came to a head with the modest uprising, like the Madi, the Islamic sort of yeah, messianic figure. The Madi is like the Islamic messianic, messianic is the word I was looking for, it's the Islamic messianic figure. So there's this guy calls himself the Madi, there's a big uprising in like northeast Africa against the British, like in the Sudan and everywhere. And it doesn't go great for the British, they suffer some really significant reversals. And it leads to like this whole situation gets out of hand enough that one of their governors, a guy named Iman Pasha, gets surrounded and sieged by this massive, fairly well-equipped army of modest warriors. Now, despite the British army's purchase of a

number of Maxim guns, many generals still preferred the Gatling gun. Others considered it, and this is a direct quote from a British general unsporting. So there's this attitude that like, it's not sporting to have a machine gun, which it is not, they're not incorrect. Colonialism is sporting, but killing too many of them with an automatic weapon is unsporting. So you have to at least give them some illusion of chance, right? Yeah, yeah. And in 1886, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who we have talked about a lot on this show, is sent to relieve and rescue Iman Pasha from the Mottiesmen. Now this relief effort is kind of a mess, but he's sent with a prototype of the Maxim gun. And this is like the first time it's really used in colonial combat, mostly in like protecting

his forces as they retreat. And it works great. Like if you are trying to run away while outnumbered, having a Maxim gun at your back is a pretty, pretty sweet thing to fucking have. So folks start to take notice within the British military brass that like, well, this things, this could solve a lot of problems for us. And the battle leads to more widespread adoption of the Maxim gun by the Brits. In 1893, all of this comes to a head in what is now Zimbabwe at the Battle of Shangani. Now this was the most decisive battle of the first Matabele war. And we talk about this a bit during our Cecil Rhodes episodes. But the battle of Shangani is a fight between or the the Matabele war is a fight between the forces of the British South Africa company. So these are

British soldiers, but they're soldiers of a corporation that's also kind of a government in its own, right? We talk about this in the most evil corporation in the world episodes. We've gone over a number of these things. And these guys, these British South Africa soldiers, the Matabele war is the war that like leads to the establishment of Rhodesia, right? This is like where we get the Rhodes and stuff from. And a whole lot of problems as a result of that. It's still having that debate today. Still having that problem. Yeah, still, still an uncomfortable number of Facebook ads selling me Rhodesian camouflage gear. It is a nice pattern. So, yeah. Oh, yeah, nothing against their aesthetics going out and fighting in that camo with your

short shorts looked pretty cool. But what they were actually doing wasn't all that cool. No, it was not cool. But yeah, so the leader of the Matabele, a guy named Robin Gula has 20,000 riflemen and the Matabele were competent strategists and pretty well organized and disciplined at Shangani 3000 of their best men surrounded a force of 700 British soldiers. Now, in an earlier period, this probably would have been a massacre or at the very least a hard fought and brutal retreat for the British. But on this day, the forces of the South Africa company had the maxim gun and the Matabele had not in the slaughter that followed more than 1500 Matabele are killed largely by the four maximum guns the British brought to bear on their forces.

Four British soldiers died. Nothing like this had ever been seen in colonial warfare, like a kill ratio like this. It was it was unthinkable as a disaster for the Matabele. Their leader commits suicide on the battlefield. Several other warriors hang themselves during the retreat. It is a calamity for them. And it is it's like it's a shock around the world because this is the first time that you see what a machine gun can do. And obviously 1500 to four, it's a pretty stark lesson here. Yeah, real shades of 1914 there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is I mean, a number of the men killing the Matabele that day would probably die go on to get killed by machine guns on the Western Front. So it was very impactful back home. Shangani, the battle

is an instant hit back in England. There's breathless nudge coverage. There's all these lurid illustrations of like British soldiers heroically surrounded fighting off hordes of barbarians. And this is compounded a week later when a force of 6000 Matabele attack Bimbezi and are again massacred by mass fire from Maxim's gun. 2500 warriors die in this battle. And Matabele resistance crumbles after this, bringing the whole world Rhodesia. And these are just like these are nightmare battles. Like if you actually think about what it means to mow down 2500 men with machine guns, it's horrific. But that's not the picture that the British people, like the people back home are actually getting of these battles, which is we're going to talk about in a bit.

But the impact of this gun on the colonization of Africa is enough on its own that Maxim would get a place in behind the bastards. His gun makes the largest and most terrible era of European domination in Africa possible, right? The actual like the real like the scramble for Africa and the real complete lockdown of the continent by Europeans, I don't think happens without the Maxim gun. It's absolutely necessary in a lot of the atrocities that comes next. And without Maxim, there is certainly no Rhodesia. And we could go on for a long time about the horrors and lingering consequences of that pariah state. The centrality of the Maxim gun to colonial military strategy was immortalized by the writer Hilaire Belak in a line uttered by one of his

characters. Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not. Now, that's a quote I think a lot of people have heard, especially if you've listened to Dan Carlin's wonderful series on World War One. But it actually it's very meaningful for how soldiers thought about the Maxim gun. That's not how civilians thought about the Maxim gun. And the actual the influence of the Maxim gun on the culture of colonizing nations is a lot more insidious than you might think. Now, I want to show you a popular picture of the Battle of Shangani illustrated by artist Richard Woodville, Jr. So if you can you drop that into the chat. This is really interesting and not something I really had thought about because I had assumed when I read it, I'd read about this battle a few

times. I thought I assumed the people back home knew, oh, we had a machine gun. And so we were able to kill a shitload of people. And that's why we didn't have so many warriors die. That's not what a lot of British people know. They just know four of our guys died for 1500 of theirs because we're such good fighters, right? Like, that's that's the lesson that they take. And it's a lesson that is, um, it's, uh, it's put forward in a lot of these colonial paintings and illustrations and this, this, this illustration I'm showing you right now, there's like a bunch of British soldiers and like cowboy style hats on a wagon train and they've got like rifles in hand and there's, there's natives charging at them at very close range, getting gun down. There's dead horses,

wounded British soldiers. And it looks like it's happening at very close range and it's this like desperate struggle, right? That's fascinating because as, as, as, as, as is noted, there's not a maximum here in sight. It really looks this, this, this artwork is the typical authoritarian style artwork at which it shows the, the massive fighting capabilities and brilliance of our heroic men fighting off at this last stand and their, their capabilities made it four to what 1500 you said. Yeah. But the reality is we didn't want to give, uh, the citizens the reality that we were just massacring essentially defenseless people with improved technology. Yes. And it is, it is really important to note, like you said, there's not a maximum gun visible in this. Every, it's, it's

men with rifles, right? That's, that's really worth noting. Um, so the fact that this picture excludes the maximum gun to present an unrealistic picture of the battle is not an isolated event. In fact, historians have studied and written extensively, um, about how comprehensively the maximum gun, arguably the most essential tool for this phase of colonialism was excised from the British popular imagination. And I'm going to quote now from a write up by Raimi Myse of the Rutgers art review graduate journal, quote, these brutal imperial campaigns were subsequently met with a mountain of printed pictures in order to satiate the interests of an eager British public. Few artists contributed as prolifically as Richard Caten Woodville, Jr. To the wealth of war imagery

that colored the widely circulated illustrated newspapers, a self-professed special war artist of the 1880s and 1890s, albeit one who had never personally experienced battle, Woodville submitted thousands of drawings to a wide variety of publications covering almost every imperial crusade. His illustrations, prints and oil paintings incorporated the accepted motifs of high Victorian military art, such as the belief in great men and military heroes, the depiction of war is an inspiring adventure filled with noble sacrifice and a compositional focus on hand-to-hand combat and glorious cavalry charges, fraught with soldiers courageously lunging and thrusting with swords and bayonets. However, almost never does the machine gun upon which the majority of these

colonial victories were wholly dependent make an appearance. So from the 1890s, up to the early 1900s, colonial victories against what seemed like long odds were celebrated in the news and popular nonfiction with stories of heroism next to full color illustration of small bands of Englishmen surrounded fighting back-to-back against hordes of enemies. The maximum gun isn't in almost any of these pictures. It virtually does not appear in British popular illustrations of war in this period. Meanwhile, the individual man with a rifle is nearly worshiped and there grows to be an increasing connection between the very idea of manhood and the rifle. As F. Norrie's Connell wrote in his 1899 book, How Soldiers Fight,

Apart from his physique, the Britisher has no particular qualification as a cavalier and he lacks the quick intelligence of the born artillerymen, but give him a rifle and a bayonet and let him have two years training to make a man of him and yet two more to remind him that he cannot be one without the other. You see what he's saying there? You need all this training not just to teach you how to use a rifle and to make you into a man, but to remind you that you're not a man without a rifle. Like that's... This is masterful propaganda and a lot of the history work I do within range. I find what is so interesting to me isn't that the narrative itself that's painted and frequently the narratives are lies or even if they're not lies, what's most interesting is the

things or are the things that are intentionally left out that paint the picture they want and this is a great example of that. It's not what they say, it's what they don't say that frequently makes the narrative. Yeah, and it's... Remind me to talk about how that kind of referred... I think what might be about to be the modern version of this with modern weaponry because there's a conversation there, but in his paper, Raimi Meis cites this guy's quote and makes what I think is an extremely astute observation. Quote, in this estimation, the firearm is not simply an ancillary tool, but rather a constitutive agent in the making of the modern male soldier. Woodville's pictures, when examined through this lens, demonstrate that the machine gun's usage

and physical mechanisms both analogize and reinscribe the volatile nature of constructions of masculinity at the turn of the century. In other words, the act of being a man with a rifle is seen as the ideal of manhood, but the reality, which is that individual riflemen matter very little next to the presence of a maximum gun, that's hidden. Raimi goes on to write, the effectiveness of the gun was impervious to mass casualties. As long as one man survived to aim a functional gun, the odds remained in his favor. Manpower was rendered almost irrelevant and the gun reigned supreme. As such, the machine gun was a vitally useful tool in the colonization of Africa and, as John Ellis chillingly pronounces, time and time again automatic fire enabled small groups

of settlers or soldiers to stamp out any indigenous resistance to their activities and to extend their writ over vast areas of the African continent. Yet also, according to Ellis, in England and other countries, machine guns remained hidden until the very outbreak of World War I. As previously mentioned, this is certainly corroborated by the machine gun's absence in popular war imagery and news coverage. What might be the underlying reasons for such reluctance on the part of the army and special war artists to acknowledge the machine gun's influence in their campaigns? For one, to quote Ellis once more, where was the glory? Where was the vicarious excitement for the reader's back home if one told the truth about the totally superior firepower?

One couldn't pin a metal on a weapon. The machine gun refuted the need for almost all forms of traditional Victorian military heroics, direct combat, cavalry charges, and the traditional British infantry square. As Ellis observes, Europeans, particularly the British, were too concerned with trumpeting the virtues of their small squares of heroes to admit that much of the credit for these sickeningly total victories should go to the machine guns. I don't want to get ahead of the discussion here, but this makes me think right off the bat about the machine gun or using these weapons against the indigenous people. Not that different than someone sitting at a computer launching drone strikes. Yeah, that's one of the things I want to talk about. Another of them would

be the wire guided missile, which is almost invisible in American popular depictions of combat, but is the most important weapon system in a lot of the different conflicts that we're involved in right now. And I have some friends who are deep, like one of the things they're concerned about is that, well, if you look at a lot of our near peer adversaries, one of the things that they're doing is they're putting a lot of wire guided missiles on small transports, little armored vehicles and stuff like that, even on technicals. And the United States, which is very dependent on large armored vehicles like MRAPs, does not do that to nearly so much of an extent. And these huge vehicles that we've built in order to render our troops effectively invulnerable to roadside

bombs and all forms of incoming fire, you very almost can't shoot one of those things to pieces unless you've got like a fucking Milan or some other kind of wider guided missile, in which case, it's just a big tomb. And it's one of those things I can remember sitting in the fucking dust in Mosul with a couple of little Iraqi kids drinking water and like watching these massive MRAPs drove by. Those are the only times I ever saw Americans that weren't journalists out in Mosul. You never saw them in person. They were in these Titanic and vulnerable vehicles. And those things are more or less invulnerable when you're fighting somebody whose best anti-armor weapon is a homemade RPG or something they may have stolen from the Iraqi armory. But they're

going to be increasingly useless in a world that has so many more of these weapons in part because we've just been shot getting them all over the goddamn place. Like that's the big thing we gave the Kurds a shitload and we've given them all over the place because it's an easy weapon system to give your allies to enable them to take out any kind of armored vehicle effectively. And the fact that it makes no presence in American popular imagination and is the kind of thing that I think could be completely disruptive to U.S. battle doctrine is something that is is is going to be a thing at some point like. But you know what else is completely disruptive to U.S. battle doctrine? Social media. Well, yeah. That might take a hit. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter could be a real

problem. But also the products and services that support this podcast. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me

to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left

defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put

forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. One thing I should also note, do you ever play any Warhammer when you were a kid, Carl? Actually, I didn't. I mean, I'm really familiar with the aesthetic. But no, I never played it myself. It struck me as I was looking through all these old paintings of like British military victories in Africa, like, oh, that's what all of the old Warhammer artists based on. Because obviously those are kids all

grew up in like British public schools and saw a million of these a circle of men surrounded by a horde of enemies like that sort of thing. Like, a lot of them are the same pictures. Yeah, it's interesting when you find those connections like that, the things that the echoes of things from the past that then manifest themselves in ways in the future, even something as simple as science fiction art. Yeah, I always find that fascinating. Yeah, it's really interesting to me. And I'm sure there's more to be I'm sure somebody who wanted to could write a very interesting paper on that. But yeah, so the point that my is the author of this paper is making is crucial to a number of the historical events

that come next after kind of the scramble for Africa, the supposed fearlessness of colonial soldiers against tremendous numerical odds was made entirely possible by machine guns. But the massive popular imagination around these events led to widespread attitudes in Victorian England and beyond that the truest way to become a real man was to go and see war. And it was a pretty safe bet because since you've got the fucking maximum gun, you'll probably survive. And you'll you'll come back with this story or whatever. And you continue this this kind of legend of what these fights are like, because you don't want to tell people, well, we just kind of pulled the trigger on a maximum gun until there weren't people left.

Victorian scholar Angus McLaren notes to be a man required effort and labor that was not required of a woman. One did not go to female by force to will her to be a woman. She was born one. And my's goes on to include the machine gun, however, negated most of these characteristics of manhood. Indeed, it obstructed any opportunity for legitimate confrontation when used against poorly armed opponents and rendered obsolete qualities like strength and skill in hand to hand combat. So the British and other colonizing nations are increasingly glorifying this idea of the colonial soldier of the man willing to fight for his empire of the value of like physical courage and like being willing to get stuck into a fight. And also obscuring the fact that

none of those qualities matter anymore, because machine guns exist. We see this echo again in Rhodesia when there's Logan was being man amongst men. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's this, it's this very false idea of the nature of conflict in order to in this period, it's less of a con because most of the men who joined the army in this period like that you go over get shipped to Africa. Yeah, you'll probably make it back. You're not likely to face serious threat because you've got this weapon. Once the machine guns get turned on each other, you know, it's a different, it's a different thing. And of course, the reality is that Maxim's gun had rendered courage skill and toughness completely meaningless. Nothing matters when

you're standing in front of a machine gun, but that there's a man behind that machine gun. But an entire generation of British and European manhood was raised on fantasies about what war was going to mean in the 21st century. Here, a Maxim got unfathomably rich, selling governments the instruments by which this generation would be slaughtered en masse. By the end of the 1800s, all the nations of Europe were going gag off for Maxim's gun. He sold it to the Germans as the MGO nine to the British as the vickers. And as his weapon flew off the proverbial shelves, he made regular improvements and upgrades to increase its reliability and killing power. He developed his own smokeless powder alongside his brother Hudson, which made the weapon much easier to use in mass

confrontations between two proper armies. This is the last big development that makes it effective for European conflict because the first version of the Maxim gun, there's the kind of smoke that it makes is so distinctive that you can target it with artillery very easily. The new smokeless powder makes it a lot harder to see and thus harder to like just blow up the machine guns when you find them with, you know, field guns or whatnot. Maxim was overjoyed to sell his weapon to multiple sides in the same war. This happened first in 1905, when both the Russians and Japanese went to battle with his guns. If any of these powers were irritated at Maxim, they wanted his weapon badly enough to keep their mouths shut. The Queen of England made him a British citizen

in 1900, which he was happy to accept. He had never quite forgiven the United States for refusing to buy his weapon. Most of the rest of Maxim's life was, in fact, a process of him using his fame and wealth to harp on slights and grudges. His autobiography was largely a canvas for him to lay out petty irritations against other inventors. He even fell out with his brother Hudson, jealous that Hudson had an equal faculty for invention. At one point, Huram hired a private detective to stalk his brother and sabotage his work. Hudson would later claim, he told me one time that if the telescope hadn't been invented, he would have invented it, and I think he never felt kindly towards Galileo for having got ahead of him. That's very offended by the fact that other

people make things. So yeah, bit of a dick. Hudson responded to his brother's provocation by tracking down Helen Layton, a teenage girl that Huram had tricked into marrying him while he was already married to someone else. Maxim was charged with bigamy. Although he was acquitted, the charges ensured that he was the subject of mockery and whispered discussion for the rest of his life. By the time he was an old man, Huram was completely deaf from years of weapons testing without hearing protection. He also suffered bronchitis for the last 16 years of his life, which was probably had something to do with, you know, all of the gunpowder and explosions and stuff he hung out around or whatever chemicals he was snoring every day. Good God only knows what

kind of shit he was inhaling, you know? Yeah. And that actually led to his last really significant invention, which was an inhaler to basically help with like asthma and the like. He called it the pipe of peace, his design, because you couldn't spray with the kind of force that you can today. It was like a long glass tube where you would kind of like a crack pipe heat a thing in a glass bulb and then inhale it to the back of the throat, which was it was it was a big improvement over similar kinds of devices that had existed before. He filled his with menthol and evergreen mixed with water, and he believes this is the first time that menthol was ever used for this account to like actually decongest and soothe the throat. He's the first person to use menthol

for that purpose. He claims, I don't, I haven't found any arguments against that. I'm sure it was used in some sort of indigenous medicine before he came across it, but he's certainly the first person to like do this and market it. And these are very popular. His inhalers, he sells hundreds of thousands of these. And it's funny because like this is actually a really significant invention. It's a major device within kind of the line of descendant of the asthma inhaler and stuff like it's a very meaningful development for like human health that he contributes to here. But a lot of people make fun of him for it. They call it like a quack remedy and attack him for it in a way that he never had been before in his career. And so in his 1915 autobiography,

Maxim wrote, quote, 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. He ain't wrong. That's what people like, right? No, seriously. This is so interesting. This guy was all over the board. I mean, from not being associated with the light bulb to making one of the worst in terms of effective killing machines on the battlefield to something that actually legitimately was a medical health device. I mean, that's wild. Yeah, it is. I mean, you could curling iron. Don't forget. Oh, curling iron is obviously a curling as well. Yeah. You're not wrong here. Maxim lived long enough to see his weapon reach its apotheosis during the outbreak

of the First World War. He died in the winter of 1916, most of the way through the Battle of the Somme. By that point in the war, more than 750,000 British soldiers had been killed. The majority of these deaths by some accounts like two thirds were the result of German machine guns. In one day at the Somme, more than 20,000 British boys were cut down by machine gunfire. So he lives to see it. And in the days before his death, there's no evidence that he was actually troubled by this at all. According to the website, American Heritage, quote, he had other concerns in his last years. He had rented a front room at the top of a building in a London business district, and there he spent hours blowing black beans out of a pea shooter at a Salvation Army band

that regularly played across the street. This raises such interesting questions about like, it raises such interesting questions because technology is going to advance whether you're the person doing it or not. Sure. If it wasn't maximum, there was going to be another machine gun, right? And so I'm not justifying at the same time the question is, if it wasn't maximum, it was someone else. So I bet you that was pretty much where he was putting his mindset at that point. You have to, right? Especially when you're hearing like, oh, I made a thing and 20,000 kids died in a day because of it. Like, yeah, of course you, and you're not like, obviously, other people were working on this, someone would have made a machine gun. I think you could argue

that like, yeah, but maybe he was so smart, maybe it would have taken another 10 years. And maybe that means colonialism in Africa never really gets to the same point or like, we can do what ifs all the day, live long day. Obviously, I tend to be more trends and forces than great man. And it like, someone would have developed this, right? There would have been machine guns mowing down a generation of European youth in World War One with or without here a maximum. Maybe the guns wouldn't have worked as well. Maybe it would have taken longer. You know, these are all the things that can be debated on. Wooden, he was predominantly done with single shot trapdoor rifles, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So, obviously, it's one of those things. It's probable. I think it's either

kind of between him or Krupp, because field artillery also kills an astronomical number of people. Probably, but probably him or Krupp that you would say is like the weapon inventor whose invention killed the most people, both directly and like, every other machine gun that exists up to the modern day is in some way descended from the maximum gun, right? Like, even if it's just ascended and that machine guns have a place in every military as a result of the success of the maximum guns, the same with like Krupp's artillery, right? Like, it's all descended. That said, if Krupp hadn't figured out how to make cannons better than the big old brass Napoleonic ones, someone was going to, right? Like, these are all worth talking about.

Yeah. That's one of the interesting questions that always pops up with the work I do, especially with firearms, and it applies to this, which is, I intrinsically come from the idea that technology is going to happen regardless, and that the question isn't, shooter should not technology exist? I mean, there's a lot of things in this world I wish didn't exist. It'd be nice to live in a world without water, cold, belt-filled machine guns and nuclear weapons. But the reality is they do, and the problem isn't necessarily that technology is what we as humans do with it. Yeah. And I think that's where the degree to which he's more morally culpable is the, yeah, of course, I'll sell to both sides, and everyone should have this thing. I want to get

this out there as much as is fucking possible. And then, to be honest, though, like the greatest evil done as a result of the maximum gun is, I think what we talked about in the middle of the episode, the hiding it from the populaces of the nations using it until it couldn't be hidden anymore. That's, and that's not on maximum. That's just, there's a lot of blame to go around there, and it's a really fascinating thing to think about. And that's the thing that didn't have to happen, right? Someone was going to make a machine gun. It wasn't inevitable that the machine gun would be hidden from the people paying for it to be used on other folks. That wasn't inevitable. Makes you wonder what we're not aware of right now. Yeah. Well, yeah. We can talk about a number

of different weapon systems, yeah. Or other things for that matter, right? Yeah. Yeah. But yep. That's the story of Hera Maxim, Carl. That's pretty amazing. I mean, obviously, I'm very familiar with the weapon and what it was used for in World War I. I was not as familiar with its use in the colonial efforts, which is particularly fascinating. Like I said earlier, the, what's, what's a masterful propaganda is less about what people talk about, but what they leave out of the narrative. And that in this instance, painted a very dismal picture. Like you said, there's no honor in going to be a soldier for the British Empire and then pushing a button and slaughtering 1,500 people defenselessly. Yeah. There's no honor in that. Even that's not sporting,

as they would say, right? Yeah. And, but at the same time, they definitely wanted people to feel as though that, that honor was to be in that, in that empire and to further the empire's goals, the amount of people murdered in the process, totally irrelevant. Yeah. And it is this thing where war becomes very unsporting. And that's, that's a big part of like the first year, particularly of World War I, is all of these, these gallant French soldiers and their colorful pants and these, you know, legions of German 16 year old boys at the slaughter of the Hitler's first big battle, if I'm not mistaken. All of these young men who learned very quickly that there's nothing sporting about war any longer, if indeed there ever was. An interesting read in

that regard. If you ever read a Manfred von Richthoff and the Red Baron's autobiography, he talks about being in the first cavalry charges of the war and very quickly being someone of Prussian descent and the ability to do something different. He decides, wow, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. I'm going to go join the air service, right? But it's a real interesting, the first couple chapters of his autobiography are very much about this is what I thought I was going to see and this is what I actually saw. Yeah. And it's a lot of people were shocked. I think when they ran into that first fuselage of fully automatic fire. It's, it's remarkable. And in terms of like, how recent a lot of this was, I interviewed a man once who had,

he was 14 when World War ended and in the Hitler Youth, he was a German man. His grandfather was a Prussian cavalryman who had fought in the War of 1870 and charged men on horseback with a sword. And I like, I shook hands with this man who had shaken hands with a man who fought on horseback with a saber like that. It's not that far ago. It's not that long ago that like that was war. And it was Maxim's gun that had a major role in why that seems like the fucking medieval days now. Yeah. That in the aircraft, right? Those are the two that to me right off the bat changed everything so much that the world was completely unrecognizable within, say, two years. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's really, it's something else. Well, Carl, we've got more to

talk about another, another guy who made a gun and also a guy who we don't have to do the whole, well, someone would have made it thing because absolutely no other fucking person would have made the kind of weapons this dude was obsessed with making. All right. He's a beautiful maniac. We will be talking about him in part two. But for right now, Carl, do you have any pluggables to plug? I mean, just my normal thing. I run in range TV. You can find my content. You can find all my different distribution points at in range.tv. I'm sometimes referred to as an alternative voice in the firearms content creator community in that I'm actually try to be inclusive and believe that rights are for everyone up for a specific category of people. And that makes

you controversial in the firearms community. But if that's your bag, come check me out at in range.tv. Definitely check Carl out at in range TV. And, um, you know, get yourself a Gatling gun. There's nothing stopping you. I don't know. I don't know. I was feeling, I mean, if you're feeling a little colonial, you went on a maximum, right? Or if you're feeling like world domination, maybe some sort of tactical nuke, I mean, probably available in the market now, right? I mean, fingers crossed that that would really make me feel a lot safer when I go out to Fred Meyer to do my grocery shopping. Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, a minute man or two, just a couple of minutes, you know, like a derringer with them. What's more viable

than a personal spouse defense item, except like a little tiny tactical nuke on your belt. Look, if everybody had a tiny tactical nuke, we would no longer have fistfights. Hey, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke. That's right. That's right. Uh, that, well, that was the story of the cold war. It was. All right. Well, that's all for part one, part two electric boogaloo coming up. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for

this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart

radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.