Machine Gun Mystery
William Cantelow - Hiram Maxim
Disappearance of English Inventor
In the early 1880’s, William Cantalow announced to his family that he had perfected a new invention; a rapid firing automatic gun which he believed would revolutionize warfare. Then the Victorian engineer packed his bags and was never seen again. Could he have travelled to the United States and assumed a new identity.
Soon after a man called Hiram Maxim patents an automatic gun. And its Maxim that’s credited as the inventor of the machine gun. The Cantelow family believes their ancestor and Hiram Maxim could be one and the same. But why? William Cantalow was a pub landlord with a passion for inventing things. He kept details of his work a closely guarded secret. He worked in the underground tunnels beneath his pub. Neighbours reported hearing strange sounds coming from the cellar. Rapid gunfire was often heard but never seen. All this fell silent once Cantelow disappeared. Only his family knew of his new gun, but this was the weapon that would revolutionize warfare, Hiram Maxim’s automatic machine gun.
Jonathan Ferguson, curator of firearms “The leap forward in the 1880’s as far as we know was to exploit the energy stored in the cartridge, not just to push the bullet out of the barrel, but to drive the working parts of the gun back and forwards again, picking up another round, pushing it into the chamber and firing it for as long as you hold down the trigger.”
Is there a chance that William Cantelow could have invented the same sort of gun at exactly the same time? The mystery of his disappearance has perplexed his family for more than 130 years. A large sum of money is believed to have been transferred out of Cantelow’s bank account. No one knows where it went. Shortly after Maxim arrives in London, Cantelow’s sons sees a picture of him in the newspaper but are convinced it is their father.
After an encounter with Maxim at Waterloo Station, the family believes that Cantelow and Maxim are one and the same. It is a story which has become part of family history. One which his great-great-grandson Barry Cantelow has spent more than 40 years researching.
Barry Cantelow “The boys saw the man who they addressed as father who said, come home. Sadly, it was the point of departure for the train. The man said ‘Hello boys’, but the train was leaving, so he hopped on the train and away he went. This was obviously disturbing for the boys. They had reported seeing the man who they would happily identify as their father. The only difference being that he had a slight American accent.”
In the hope of shedding some more light on this mystery I’ve brought both images to Professor Mark Nixon who’s a pioneer in face-recognition technology.
Professor Mark Nixon “Well, clearly there’s some similarities and you see the hairline might be in the same place, the nose appears to be in a similar place, the mouth is in a similar place but, there appears to be some difference too. And there’s a lot of stuff we can’t see.”
So yet one more dead-end in the family mystery. The baffling circumstances surrounding Cantelow’s disappearance have never been fully explained. Maxim writes in his autobiography that a man was impersonating him in the U.S. whilst he was in Britain. Was it a case of mistaken identity or was Maxim just putting people off the scent?
CREDITS: All of the above information came from the BBC’s “The One Show” screened on 29th Oct 2015
