Hiram Maxim

Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was an American-born inventor who became a naturalized British subject in 1899 and was knighted in 1901, decades before the automatic machine gun that made him famous. In the late 1870s he installed some of the first electric lights in a New York City office building at 120 Broadway, and in 1878 he co-founded the United States Electric Lighting Company with fellow inventor Edward Weston to manufacture and sell his arc and incandescent lighting designs commercially. His lighting career brought him into a long and bitter patent dispute with Thomas Edison over priority on the incandescent lightbulb, in which Maxim argued that Edison's advantage lay in a better grasp of patent law rather than in having actually invented the lamp first. He left electric lighting behind after moving to England in 1881, where his later work on automatic firearms overshadowed his earlier career as one of America's early electric lighting engineers.