The words “Maxim” and “peace” somehow don’t seem to go together. Hiram Maxim’s most famous invention-the machine gun-has killed countless thousands of men, from Matabeleland to Manchuria and Mafeking to Mons. Yet there, tucked neatly into a box at London’s Science Museum, is a strange glass globe distinctly labelled “Sir Hiram Maxim’s Pipe of Peace”. Had Maxim done with death and turned peacemaker?
Not exactly. As Maxim grew older he began to suffer debilitating bouts of bronchitis. His search for a remedy failed. So, prolific inventor that he was, he created his own inhaler. It was simple: half-fill the glass globe with water and add a few drops of Maxim’s own calming concoction. Gently warm the globe, then breathe in deeply through the swan-necked tube. Almost instantly, the soothing vapours begin to work exactly where they are needed, at the furthest reaches of the throat. There was just one drawback: Maxim’s meddling in medicine threatened to destroy the reputation he had earned as the inventor of the world’s most efficient killing machine.
ENGLAND in the winter was a notoriously unhealthy place-cold, damp and almost guaranteed to bring on coughs, colds and more serious respiratory ailments. But to Hiram Maxim, the unwholesome winter air seemed a small price to pay for fame, fortune and a knighthood, his reward for inventing a weapon that changed the face of warfare.
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Maxim came from Maine, and had been an inventor since his youth. But in 1881, at the age of 41, he left the invigorating climate of New England and moved to London to perfect his automatic gun. The Maxim gun fired 666 rounds a minute, using the energy from each bullet’s recoil to eject the spent cartridge and insert and fire the next. Adopted by the British Army in 1889, the weapon first saw service in the Matabele War of 1893. In the First World War both sides used virtually identical versions of Maxim’s gun. Soon almost every major military power had adopted it.
By 1900, and now aged 60, Maxim began to succumb to regular attacks of bronchitis, one of the penalties of breathing the damp, smoggy air that blanketed London each winter. His bronchitis grew steadily worse, yet nothing his doctor recommended seemed to do any good. He consulted specialists. He traipsed from one mineral spa to another. But there was little improvement. “I submitted to a very long system of steaming and boiling and taking the waters with no effect,” he wrote.
Eventually, he ended up in the south of France and placed himself in the hands of Monsieur Vos, who ran a famous and fashionable “Inhalatorium” in Nice. At last, here was something that helped. He inhaled warm vapours dosed with menthol and pine for an hour at a time and for weeks on end. By April he was well enough to return to London. “However, with the cold and foggy weather of the next autumn the trouble returned as bad as ever,” he complained.
So it was back to Nice. This time, Maxim did more than inhale. He listened to doctors and fellow patients, trying to learn as much as he could about both his sickness and Vos’s apparatus. When he returned to London, he bought some glass tubing and began to experiment with an inhaler of his own.
Doctors knew that warm vapours were good-and that vapours laced with pine essence were better, for pine worked as an antiseptic. But the design of most inhalers, Maxim insisted, meant that almost all the healing vapour was absorbed by the lining of the mouth and never had a chance to work on the inflamed and painful membranes of the throat.
His solution was to design an inhaler that delivered the warm vapour exactly where it was needed, by the simple device of a dent about 5 centimetres from the end of the tube. With the teeth placed in the dent, the opening of the tube was close to the back of the mouth. “By making a mouthpiece of such a shape that the vapours were introduced directly into the throat instead of medicating the inside of the mouth I found that my simple device was much more effective than the very elaborate machinery of Mr Vos,” said Maxim.
Convinced he was onto something, Maxim had more inhalers made and gave them away to fellow sufferers. As word of their effectiveness spread, demand grew. Eventually hundreds of thousands of them were sold.
Maxim was not content with simply delivering the remedy to the right place. He also provided what he thought was a far better form of medication. Although pine essence brought relief, it was liable to cause a tickle in the throat when the patient began to inhale-a tickle that could set off a cough, which doctors feared might strain an already weakened chest. Maxim wanted the power of pine without its irritant effect.
At the time, doctors in France added a small amount of cocaine to the inhalant, which numbed the throat and allowed a patient to inhale more concentrated pine vapours. Maxim considered cocaine a poison and swapped it for essence of wintergreen, a plant from his home state of Maine. It “really benumbs the mouth and throat just as cocaine does, only in a less degree. By mixing a small quantity of the oil of this plant with pine essence, the vapours may be inhaled very strong without producing coughing.” He called his concoction Dirigo, from the Latin meaning “I guide”-which just happened to be the motto on the Maine coat of arms.
Maxim’s Pipe of Peace was intended for long and regular use at home, with three or four sessions of 15 minutes or more a day. For rapid relief and for travelling, Maxim made a pocket-sized inhaler ready charged with crystals of menthol, another soothing and antiseptic compound.
Despite the popularity of the device, Maxim’s friends were worried that it could damage his standing as a scientist. “Some of my friends not altogether unconnected with the gun business have told me that I have ruined my reputation absolutely by making a medical inhaler, and a scientific friend has written me deploring the fact that one so eminent in science as myself should descend to ‘prostituting my talent on quack nostrums’,” he grumbled in his autobiography. “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 couldn’t really have cared less. “I suppose I shall have to stand the disgrace,” he said. “If I had not found the means of cure,” he added, “I could not live on this side of the Atlantic at all.”
