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 twelve 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,
for it was the first vehicle other than
horse-drawn that I had ever
seen. 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 coal cart trailing
behind. I had seen plenty of
these engines hauled around by horses, but
this one had a chain that made
a connection between the engine and the
rear wheels of the wagon-like
frame on which the boiler was mounted. The
engine was placed over the
boiler and one man standing on the platform
behind the boiler shoveled
coal, managed the throttle, and did the
steering. It had been made by
Nichols, Shepard & Company of Battle
Creek. I found that out at
once.
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. He was proud of it. He showed
me how the chain was
disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt
put on to drive other
machinery. He told me that the engine made two
hundred revolutions a minute
and that the chain pinion could be shifted
to let the wagon stop while
the engine was still running. This last is a
feature which, although in
different fashion, is incorporated into
modern automobiles. It was not
important with steam engines, which are
easily stopped and started,
but it became very important with the
gasoline engine.
It was that
engine which took me into automotive
transportation. I tried to
make models of it, and some years later I did
make one that ran very well,
but from the time I saw that road engine as
a boy of twelve right forward
to to-day, my great interest has been in
making a machine that would
travel the roads.
Driving to town I always
had a pocket full of
trinkets--nuts, washers, and odds and ends of
machinery. Often I took a
broken watch and tried to put it together.
When I was thirteen I managed
for the first time to put a watch together
so that it would keep time. By
the time I was fifteen I could do almost
anything in watch
repairing--although my tools were of the crudest.
There is an immense amount to
be learned simply by tinkering with
things. It is not possible to
learn from books how everything is
made--and a 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.