Mr. Maxim was the first man in the world to make an automatic gun; that
is, a gun that loads and fires itself by its own reactionary force.
He was also the first to combine gun-cotton and nitro-glycerine in a
smokeless powder. The practicability of his flying machine is yet to be
proved.
Such is Maxim, the ghost of whose presence appears to bellicose rulers
and bids them halt,—and they do halt. It is said that the British
Government and Hiram S. Maxim are two of the world’s most powerful
influences for peace.
Next consider the human being,—the big, brown-eyed, white-bearded man,
over sixty years young,—for he was born in Maine, in 1840.
He seems to me to be a man with two ambitions: primarily, to keep
on inventing, and, secondarily, to be the most famous inventor of
all ages. His intellect and energy demand progress, his vanity
demands fame. He doesn’t appear to care for money, save as a means
to a desired end. His personality might be considered unbalanced.
His sense of self-suppression does not correspond with his fairly
colossal intellect. The character of his intellectuality is uniform.
The philosophical rather than the scholarly instinct dominates it.
Another evidence of his quality of humanity is his sensitiveness to
unfair censure. “I don’t fear truthful criticism,” he once said;
“misrepresentation is what hurts.”
It is difficult for one who knows him to imagine anything which he
could not master. I once asked him the question, and he said he
believed he would have succeeded at anything, except as a clergyman or
a physician; that his religious views would preclude the former, and
that he had a distaste for the latter.