Birth
Maxim was born in Sangerville, Maine in the United States in 1840. He became an apprentice coachbuilder at the age of 14 and ten years later took up a job at the machine works of his uncle, Levi Stephens, at Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He subsequently worked as an instrument maker and as a draughtsman. (His early jobs in these arenas led him to often be disappointed with workers when he ran his own companies later on in life.)
Read more about this topic: Hiram Stevens Maxim
Famous quotes containing the word birth:
“Before the birth of the New Woman the country was not an intellectual desert, as she is apt to suppose. There were teachers of the highest grade, and libraries, and countless circles in our towns and villages of scholarly, leisurely folk, who loved books, and music, and Nature, and lived much apart with them. The mad craze for money, which clutches at our souls to-day as la grippe does at our bodies, was hardly known then.”
—Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910)
“Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value.... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“Alas! The time is coming when man will no longer give birth to stars. Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, one who can no longer despise himself. Behold! I show you the last man.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)