Movie Makers, June 1927, 32.
1923-1936
Male
Engineer, inventor
The son of one famous inventor (Hiram Stevens Maxim, who invented the machine gun) and nephew of another (Hudson Maxim, who invented the explosive “Maximite”), Hiram Percy graduated from MIT in 1886 at the age of sixteen. Maxim was a pioneer inventor of gasoline engines and automobiles at the end of the nineteenth century, and later invented gun silencers, industrial silencers, and air conditioners. An avid amateur radio broadcaster, Maxim founded the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) in 1914. He was also a filmmaker and in 1926 became the the founder and first president of the ACL. Maxim was a regular contributor to Movie Makers and played a significant role in shaping its mission. Maxim’s writings (under his own name, and his pseudonym “Dr. Kinema”) treated a range of issues in amateur cinema, from its broad artistic significance, to pragmatic approaches to solving technical issues in filmmaking. - adapted from Tepperman, "'All the Wonderful Possibilities of Motion Pictures': Hiram Percy Maxim and the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking," Amateur Movie Making, Edited by Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)
Hiram Percy Maxim Collection, Northeast Historic Film
Maxim Collection, RG 69:12, Connecticut State Archives, Hartford, CT
Charles Tepperman, "'All the Wonderful Possibilities of Motion Pictures': Hiram Percy Maxim and the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking," Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, Edited by Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)
Alice Clink Schumacher, Hiram Percy Maxim (Greenville, NH: Ham Radio Publishing Group, 1970)
Amateur Cinema