The roots of genius

Quote of the day:

"Hang your electricity! If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly."

This was the sound advice of one friend to a discouraged inventor named Hiram Maxim, who went on to invent the machine gun.

Comments

As one poet put it:

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

Posted by Nick E | March 7, 2008 10:29 AM

On this subject I enthusiastically recommend /The Social History of the Machine Gun/ by John Ellis. It has great stuff on Maxim and the other inventors, colonialism, and a reproduction of a particularly absurd 1920s ad for the tommy gun showing a cowboy in a ten gallon hat and sheepskin chaps mowing down a gang of desperadoes.

Posted by Gabriel | March 7, 2008 10:50 AM

Always struck me as interesting how, in the middle of the nineteenth century, he knew that fool Americans would never want to kill each other.

Or at least, never reward someone who helped them.

Posted by ad | March 7, 2008 12:12 PM

"Always struck me as interesting how, in the middle of the nineteenth century, he knew that fool Americans would never want to kill each other."

Richard Jordan Gattling would beg to differ.

Posted by Njorl | March 7, 2008 12:45 PM

Njorl,

Gatling invented his (hand cranked) weapon during civil war. Maxim invented the (fully automatic) machine gun in the 1880's, and put it into production in the 1890's, which was a time when Americans were not killing each other, while the entire Europe was in a state of cold war.

Interestingly, Maxim also invented the common springloaded mouse trap. There is a famous line attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Maxim did build a better mousetrap, but that was not why the world beat a path to his door.

Posted by ZH | March 7, 2008 3:55 PM

I was joking.

The quote sounded to me as though someone was taking the moral high ground on behalf of the US. As the US had invaded Canada in 1812, Mexico in 1848, and itself in the 1860s, I imagine such an attempt would have sounded a bit silly in the 1880s.

Not that that has ever stopped anyone else from boasting of his countries moral rectitude.

Posted by ad | March 7, 2008 4:54 PM