ON February 5, it was the 175th birthday of machine gun inventor Sir Hiram Stevens, said that day’s On This Day on page four of The Northern Echo.

Ian Forsyth in Durham fired a shot across our bows. You’ve missed off his surname, he said: he was Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim and not only was he a "chronic inventor", as he called himself, he also has a special place in the hearts of North-East beer drinkers.

Sir Hiram’s story is extraordinary. In his early days, he patented a hair curling iron, and in his latter years he invented a pocket menthol inhaler and a steam pine vapour inhaler to help his fellow bronchitis sufferers.

Inbetween, he invented the world’s first portable, automatic mousetrap, a merry-go-round that you can still ride in Blackpool, and an automatic sprinkler that not only doused the flames with water but called the fire brigade while it was doing it. He also claimed to have invented the electric lightbulb before either Thomas Edison or Joseph Swan.

And in 1894, nine years before the Wright brothers’ first flight, Maxim invented a steam-driven biplane, which weighed three-and-a-half tons and had a wingspan of 104ft. On its maiden voyage in Kent, it lifted its pilot and three passengers so far off the ground that it broke the guide rails Maxim had installed to prevent it flying away. Worried that this monster was uncontrollably dangerous, he gave up on this flight of fancy and allowed other inventors to perfect the aeroplane.

By then, though, Maxim’s name was already made. He’d grown up in Maine, in the United States, surrounded by bears, and as a child had been knocked over by the recoil from a gun.

In the early 1880s he left a complicated marital situation – he had somehow married a 15-year-old girl while still married to his wife, and was later prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for bigamy – and came to Europe with his mistress.

In London in 1884, he unveiled his new belt-fed machine gun. Remembering his childhood experience, he channelled the energy in the gun's recoil so that it drove the next cartridge into the firing mechanism. His new mechanical gun could fire up to 600 rounds a minute.

The British army deployed the Maxim gun during the Boer War. In fact, when Captain Ernest Vaux of the Sunderland brewing family returned from South Africa in 1901, he suggested a new brown beer should be named after the gun.

However, Maxim ale was so strong that publicans complained it was sending their customers to sleep, so Vaux reduced its strength. But in 1938, they pepped it back up to 4.7 per cent and marketed it as “Double Maxim” – Wearside’s answer to Newcastle Brown Ale. When Vaux closed in 1999, Maxim survived, and it is still brewed in Houghton-le-Spring by the region’s largest independent brewery.

Maxim himself died on November 24, 1916, while the machine guns that he had invented, produced under licence by Germany and Russia, was slaughtering millions in the trenches, and the British version of his design – the Vickers machine gun – remained in service until 1963.

Perhaps Sir Hiram should be counted as one of its victims: although he died of a bronchial complaint, he’d spent his latter years deaf due to years of close proximity to his rapid-fire machine gun. We'd better make doubly sure we don't leave out Maxim's name next February.