What links Crystal Palace, funfair rides and machine guns?

We’re in Crystal Palace Park at the moment, where funfair rides have been delighting people for well over a century. Here you can see Sir Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machine in front of the Crystal Palace in 1904 (postcard from George Irvin’s personal collection). 

This ride was designed by Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, an American-born inventor best known for creating the first fully automatic machine gun in Hatton Garden in 1884. The Maxim gun went on to change the world and earn Hiram a knighthood (the noise from the guns also made him profoundly deaf) but what Hiram really wanted to invent was a flying machine!

He wasn’t very successful at making flying machines, but repurposed his research to make a marvellous faiground ride – the Captive Flying Machine, which made its debut at Earl’s Court in 1904, just months after the Wright brothers made the world’s first aeroplane.

Hiram made several other Captive Flying Machines in 1904, including the one for Crystal Palace, one for Southport, and one that went to Blackpool, which you can still ride at the Pleasure Beach today. We believe this makes it the oldest working permanent funfair ride in Europe!

As the ride spins, the cars sway out like chair-o-planes, simulating flight, but Hiram had hoped to go further. He had dreamed of adding rudders and airfoils so that riders could steer their cars and really feel as if they were flying, but there were doubts as to whether this would be safe. Hiram lamented that without this sense of control the ride was ‘”simply a glorified merry-go-round”. We wonder if he would have felt more pleased with the machine if he knew it was still delighting riders voer 120 years later.

Sir Hiram Maxim invented many other things, including the world’s first automatic fire sprinkler, a curling, and an aerial torpedo gun. He suffered with bronchitis and invented several inhalers to help with his condition. People were much less impressed with these than with his guns, to which he said “it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering”.

His son, Hiram Percy Maxim, invented a gun silencer and car muffler, but was too late to save his father’s hearing.

Hiram lived in south London, first in West Norwood then later in Streatham, and is buried in the beautiful West Norwood cemetery.