Old Fools Journal: the Boy Mechanic

January 28, 2009 Wednesday

One of my most prized possessions when I was a boy was a book given me by my parents for Christmas entitled “The Boy Mechanic” 700 things for a boy to do copyright 1913. After the episode with the “Arc” (see my post of January 15, 2009) you would think they would have been a little more cautious. I devoured that book and in the process made a number of things including my first microscope and ammeter. I was most interested in thing involving electricity, chemicals and, um, things that made smoke.

Here is what John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, said of this book at

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1301.htm

It's also long on things that explode. My favorite is the Fourth-of-July Catapult. This is nothing less than a pipe bomb that flings a life-sized mannequin a hundred feet into the sky. The mischief goes on for 460 pages: how to play magician and levitate a lady; how to make an object roll uphill.

Oh, the other stuff was there -- how to make a lamp or a tie rack or a coin purse. But that's not why we young boys read books like this back when the world was young. We read them because they told us how to engage all that delicious danger. We read them because they spoke to boys for whom risk-taking was a rite of passage. And we all had friends who were hurt fulfilling those rites.

He is so right.

I read every page in that book and tried a lot of it. Unfortunately (fortunate for my parents) I couldn't get some of the more dangerous chemicals even back in the 1950's. It's even harder now as the government tries to protect us from ourselves by depriving us of our fundamental right to blow ourselves up. I suspect that budding mad scientist can get around this.

I'm not sure what happened to the book but I think I gave it to my cousin. I now have a digital copy that anyone can get free on the internet from

The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 by Popular Mechanics Co - Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12655

There are still copys of this book around and I now have a hard copy of Volume ll copyright 1915 with a 1000 more things for a boy to do some which will cause loud noises, smoke, sparks and parental stress. This volume is 94 years old but I still handle it regularly and I suspect it will outlive me.

There are many things in these books that will inspire a young mind no matter how old you are. Only this last month I learned how to pressurize common household cooking gas. That's important if you want to fill balloons with it. I don't have a source of gas to practice with but maybe that's a good thing. I never did find a formula for black powder but it's probably just as well as it is very unstable in the manufacturing process. Even the professional commercial manufacturers blow themselves up every once in a while. When I was a budding boy mad scientists I did find a basic recipe in the encyclopedia at school but I could never get it to do anything but burn hot, smoke and stink which was OK too. With the help of friends I determined that a dozen firecrackers emptied of their powder (black powder in those days I believe) and repackaged in creative ways would do substantial damage to property. This book steered me away from making loud noises and toward making things before I blew off any of my fingers or burnt my hair. Many of my projects involved saws however and you can guess where that went.