This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories, and we love to tell stories about how things came to be that we now have come to know.

One of them we recently told on the elevator break

and how it created elevators everywhere in big cities around the world.

This one is the story of how the silencer came to be.

Telling the story is Ashley Lubinsky. She's the former co-host of the Discovery Channel's

Master of Arms. Take it away, Ashley. The name Maxim is most often associated with the development of the

machine gun. Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim is credited with an early successful machine gun, and his brother Hudson

was also known for something that was incredibly loud, which was his development of explosives

and propellant.

And while the inventions of the family were often known for their noise, the next generation

of the Maxim family retreated from that path

to focus more on silence.

Hiram Percy Maxim, who was the son of Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, was born in Brooklyn,

New York on September 2, 1869.

He was basically a Renaissance man throughout his life, and he would revolutionize multiple industries, automobiles, weapons, aviation, and the radio.

He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1886 at just 17 years old.

Initially, Maxim was drawn to the automotive industry.

He's probably least known for this, but he probably should be known for it most of all.

At the turn of the 20th century, it was thought that electric-powered vehicles would be the wave of the future.

Maxim, however, back then disagreed, and would champion gasoline-powered engines.

By 1892, Maxim was building his own internal combustion engine, and he updated that design, and it won the first American closed-circuit

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