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.

From the beginning I never could work up much interest in the labour of
farming. I wanted to have something to do with machinery. My father was
not entirely in sympathy with my bent toward mechanics. He thought that
I ought to be a farmer. When I left school at seventeen and became an
apprentice in the machine shop of the Drydock Engine Works I was all but
given up for lost. I passed my apprenticeship without trouble--that is,
I was qualified to be a machinist long before my three-year term had
expired--and having a liking for fine work and a leaning toward watches
I worked nights at repairing in a jewelry shop. At one period of those
early days I think that I must have had fully three hundred watches. I
thought that I could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents
and nearly started in the business. But I did not because I figured out
that watches were not universal necessities, and therefore people
generally would not buy them. Just how I reached that surprising
conclusion I am unable to state. I did not like the ordinary jewelry and