The Inventor of the Machine Gun Became Deaf—So His Son Invented the Silencer

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Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories, and we love to tell stories about how things came to be that we now have come to know. One of them we recently told on the elevator break and how it created elevators everywhere in big cities around the world. This one is the story of how the silencer came to be. Telling the story is Ashley Lebinski. She’s the former co-host of the Discovery Channel’s “Master of Arms.” Take It Away, Ashley.

00:00:41
Speaker 2: The name Maxim is most often associated with the development of the machine gun. Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim is credited with an early successful machine gun, and his brother Hudson was also known for something that was incredibly loud, which was his development of explosives and propellant. And while the inventions of the family were often known for their noise, the next generation of the Maxim family retreated from that path to focus more on silence. Hiram Percy Maxim, who was the son of Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 2, 1869. He was basically a renaissance man throughout his life, and he would revolutionize multiple industries: automobiles, weapons, aviation, and the radio. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1886 at just 17 years old. Initially, Maxim was drawn to the automotive industry. He’s probably least known for this, but he probably should be known for it most of all. At the turn of the 20th century, it was thought that electric-powered vehicles would be the wave of the future. Maxim, however, back then, disagreed and would champion gasoline-powered engines. By 1892, Maxim was building his own internal combustion at and he updated that design and it won the first American closed-circuit auto race in 1899, and of course he named it after himself. One issue that persisted in his brain when it came to cars was the noise associated with them, and so that’s when he shifts his kind of focus on engineering ways to create sound suppression, and so by doing so, he then invented and patented several types of automobile muffler systems that redirected and slowed down a car’s exhaust. Maxim then extended those patents and an idea into the concept of firearms. Obviously, Maxim grew up around firearms and he was keenly aware of how loud that they could be, so he decided to go in the opposite direction and make the weapons less noisy. It was actually considered, it is still considered today in other countries to be almost ungentlemanlike to have a loud firearm. Maxim was inspired to create what becomes the silencer in the bathtub, which sounds like the silliest story on the planet, but he was in the bathtub and he was watching the water form of vortex as it drained from the tub, and he wondered then whether gas in a firearm’s muzzle could be directed similarly to reduce noise. He patented the Maxim silencer in 1909, and the design that he had which differs from modern silencer designs, but his design forced muzzle gases through a series of curved veins that spun the gases and reduced their pressure as they cooled. Essentially, reduced pressure equaled reduced noise. Today, when you think about a silencer, a lot of people associated with self-defense, they associated with the military or even something sinister. But back then, Maxim was just applying a concept that he created for the automobile onto firearms, and it showed in kind of the desirability of the product on the market. He designed the silencer to be a civilian product. It was something to be used in sporting guns because often if you were hunting or target shooting, your firearm was pretty loud, and so you saw it pop up in the different catalogs and everything for people to buy rather than the military. The military really didn’t catch on with the silencer until the middle of the 20th century because the recoil out of 1903 was pretty hefty, and a silencer didn’t just reduce sound; it also reduced recoil, so it was a great training aid for the military back then. The Maxim Silent Firearms Company, which became the Maxim Silencer Company, didn’t just stop with silencers for firearms. They also sold automobile silencers, air hoists, steam exhaust silencers, and motorboat silencers. And they partnered a lot with General Motors to give away a free silencer with every purchase, so if you bought a car with General Motors, you got a free silencer for your firearm. At the same time, fascinating with the silencer or the suppressor is that it became highly regulated. In 1934, the National Firearms Act, which is really the first big federal firearms law in the United States, regulated several types of technology. They regulated machine guns, short bail rifles, and shotguns and also silencers. And what that meant was basically that you could still acquire it, but you had to register it and go through a much more intense background check and pay a $200 tax stamp. But what’s interesting is that nowadays in America, it is a requirement to have a muffler on your car, but to put one on your firearm, you have to go through a very long background check and pay a lot of money to stick it on the end of your gun to alleviate sound issues when you are using your firearm. And America’s kind of a stand-alone in terms of the way that they view silencers. Around the world, in many countries, they’re actually seen as an accessory. You can buy them over the counter with any background process. Because Europeans love hunting, they love target shooting, and they think it’s rude to have allowed firearm, and so it’s interesting because I feel like Hiram Percy Maxim was such a brilliant marketer that he marketed an item that was ultimately its modern dame downfall, and that was because they marketed it as an item that was silent and brilliant when you think about it. But silent today makes people think that then a silencer causes a firearm to then in fact be silent, when that’s not really the case. It suppresses sound, and in reality, most civilian accessible firearms still emit a sounds ranging from 140 to 175 decibels, and a silencer really only marginally suppresses that sound, bringing levels down to around 120 to 150 decibels. A lot of times you’re the comparison of it still sounds like a jackhammer, so it brings it down to help things, but it certainly doesn’t silence that. And here’s an example of what gunfire sounds like with and without a silencer. Hiram Percy Maxim invented the silencer. But if you talk to a gun person today, you’ll probably hear them say that it is a suppressor, and the reality is both as correct and a lot of gun people will tell you to never call it a silencer, but that’s not fair to the history. Because Maxim patented his invention in 1909 as a silencer. It says that on the patent, and then he liked the term so much that he named his company that, the Maxim Silencer Company. And if you think about it, it’s pretty brilliant marketing because who doesn’t want a firearm that doesn’t make a loud noise? And he really doubled down with this because he had advertisements where you had a family that is sitting in a room, you know, hanging out, and then in the other room, the dad is target shooting, and it basically says, “This is so silent that you don’t even have to disrupt your family in the other room.” So it’s brilliant marketing on the part of Hiram Percy Maxim. And then that term then translates into the legal term of silencer with the National Firearms Act of 1934. So a lot of people want to be more precise and they’ll say suppressor or moderator or, if you want to go back to its origins in the automobile industry: muffler. But they use that because it’s a better descriptor. But they really shouldn’t pick on people who use the historical original term, especially if they know what they’re talking about. It makes you wonder if he was not as good at marketing back in the 1900s, whether or not the invention would be as regulated as it is today.

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Speaker 1: And a terrific job by the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Angler. And a special thanks to frequent contributor here on this show, Ashley Lebinski. She’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 she’s the co-founder of the University of Wyom, I mean, College of Law’s Firearms Research Center. And what a story about Hiram Percy Maxim, born in all places of Brooklyn, learns to lower and suppress the sound and volume of the engines of cars, and from that suppression of noise became the suppression of the sound of guns for ordinary citizens. The story of the silencer here on our American Stories.