Mr. Lee toured the museum with Bob Merriam and several other volunteers–a great honor for us and, we hope, of great interest to him.
His great-grandfather, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, designed the Maxim machine gun, smokeless gunpowder and a steam airplane before 1900. There is a biography on Wikipedia and photographs of the Maxim steam airplane on the flyingmachines.org website →
Mr. Lee’s grandfather, Hiram Percy Maxim, invented an electric car and the Maxim silencer, initially for guns and later for engines. He created the American Radio Relay League, the largest membership association of amateur radio enthusiasts in the USA, in Hartford, Connecticut in 1914.
Mr. Lee’s father, John Glessner Lee, designed the Ford Trimotor airplane and engineered many jet engines. He was also instrumental in the founding of the University of Hartford. More information is in his obituary from the New York Times →
Mr Lee himself lead the design and development of the first fuel cells. Their use in the Apollo Project is described in an article from The Bee, a publication of United Technologies, and the Smithsonian Institution includes an Apollo fuel cell in its collection →