Hiram Percy Maxim

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Hiram Percy Maxim (September 2, 1869 - February 17, 1936) was co-founder of the American Radio Relay League and originally had the amateur call sign 1AW, and later W1AW, which is now the ARRL Headquarters club station call sign. His rotary spark gap transmitter "Old Betsy" has a place of honor at the ARRL Headquarters.

Hiram Percy Maxim was a mechanical engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Maxim tinkered with internal combustion engines before contacting the Pope Manufacturing Company about the possibility of manufacturing a gasoline-power automobile. Albert Augustus Pope hired Maxim to run his Motor Vehicle Division. In 1899, with Maxim at the controls, the Pope Columbia, a gasoline-powered automobile, won the first closed-circuit automobile race in the US at Branford, CT. Columbia later began manufacturing an electric automobile.

Maxim is also noted as the inventor of the "Maxim Silencer" or Suppressor for firearms (patented in 1909) as well as of a silencer (or muffler) for gasoline engines.

He created the ARRL in 1914 because he saw a need to build up an organized group of "Relay" stations to pass messages via amateur radio. This allowed messages to pass further than any particular station of the time could reach.

His father was Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, inventor of the Maxim Machine gun. H.P. Maxim wrote an amusing account of his youth in the book "A Genius in the Family: Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim Through a Small Son's Eyes." H.P. Maxim recounted his days as an automobile pioneer in his book "Horseless Carriage Days."

[edit] Death

Hiram Percy Maxim was returning to his home in Hartford, Connecticut, in February, 1936, from a trip to California to visit the Lick Observatory. He fell ill and was taken from the train to a hospital in La Junta, Colorado, where he died the following day, February 17, 1936. Hiram P. Maxim was buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Hagerstown, Maryland some days later. Hiram Maxim is buried in the Hamilton family plot in the cemetery as he had married the daughter of the former Maryland Governor Alexander T. Hamilton.