The biggest event of those early years was meeting with a road engine about eight miles out of Detroit. One day when we were driving to town, I was then 12 years old. The second biggest event was getting a watch. Which happened in the same year. I remember that engine as though I had seen it only yesterday. It was intended primarily for driving threshing machines and sawmills and was simply a portable engine and boiler mounted on wheels with a water tank and a coal car trailing behind.
The engine had stopped to let us pass with our horses, and I was off the wagon and talking to the engineer before my father who was driving, knew what I was up to. The engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair
There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It's not possible to learn from books how everything is made, and the real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic, what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains, he will apply those ideas.
I built a steam car that ran. It had a kerosene heated boiler, and it developed plenty of power and neat control, but the boiler was dangerous. To make it evenly reasonably safe, required an excess of weight that nullified the economy of high pressure. For two years, I kept experimenting with various sorts of boilers, and then I definitely abandoned the whole idea of running a road vehicle by steam.
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