Some families just have exceptional genes. The three Manning boys have done fairly well at football. John Moses Browning was the most successful firearms designer in human history, with 128 gun-related patents to his name. His brother Ed was also instrumental in the design of the iconic M1 Carbine. In a similar vein, the Maxim family had an outsized influence on the world of firearms.
Hiram Stevens Maxim was an American inventor who produced the world’s first portable fully automatic machine gun. Maxim’s basic mechanism drove the eponymous German MG08 Maxim gun as well as the British Vickers. The sheer volume of blood spilled by Maxim’s remarkable invention during the First World War boggles the mind. Maxim moved from the U.S. to the U.K. at age 41 and became a naturalized British subject in 1899. He was knighted in 1901.
