watch making work excepting where the job was hard to do. Even then I
wanted to make something in quantity. It was just about the time when
the standard railroad time was being arranged. We had formerly been on
sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-saving
days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That bothered me a
good deal and so I succeeded in making a watch that kept both times. It
had two dials and it was quite a curiosity in the neighbourhood.

In 1879--that is, about four years after I first saw that
Nichols-Shepard machine--I managed to get a chance to run one and when
my apprenticeship was over I worked with a local representative of the
Westinghouse Company of Schenectady as an expert in the setting up and
repair of their road engines. The engine they put out was much the same
as the Nichols-Shepard engine excepting that the engine was up in front,
the boiler in the rear, and the power was applied to the back wheels by
a belt. They could make twelve miles an hour on the road even though the
self-propelling feature was only an incident of the construction. They
were sometimes used as tractors to pull heavy loads and, if the owner
also happened to be in the threshing-machine business, he hitched his
threshing machine and other paraphernalia to the engine in moving from
farm to farm. What bothered me was the weight and the cost. They weighed
a couple of tons and were far too expensive to be owned by other than a
farmer with a great deal of land. They were mostly employed by people
who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills or some other
line that required portable power.

Even before that time I had the idea of making some kind of a light
steam car that would take the place of horses--more especially, however,
as a tractor to attend to the excessively hard labour of ploughing. It
occurred to me, as I remember somewhat vaguely, that precisely the same