Today, a boy's world, a century ago. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The year is 1913 -- a decade
after the Wrights first flew, and a year before
WW-I. Ford has just begun mass-producing Model-T's,
and you power your telephone with large dry-cell
batteries from the hardware store. That year, 1913,
Popular Mechanics magazine put out a book
titled The Boy Mechanic: 700 Things for Boys to
Do.
The frontispiece shows a boy stepping off a cliff
in a glider built according to instructions on page
171. The glider is rather like the ones that
flight-pioneer Otto
Lilienthal had flown until 1896, when he fell
to his death in one. There were few lawsuits and no
OSHA in 1913. If you read this wonderful old book
and then killed yourself, it was your carelessness,
not the publisher's. You'd better make the joints
secure when you built the wing.
So what else have we for a boy to do? Electricity
looms large. You can rig a device that'll ring a
bell when fish strike the line you've dropped
through the ice. Or you can rig magnets below an
Ouija board and compose your own spirit messages.
We read how to counterfeit pennies. Make a wax
impression of the penny, coat the wax with black
lead, then electroplate the penny into the wax
mould. The trick is to make a battery cell from a
strip of zinc in an electrolytic solution. The
authors talk, not about pennies, but about
replicating small objects in copper. Still, the
implication is clear enough. The book is full of
electrochemistry. It tells how to generate hydrogen
or acetylene.
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.
The book has 800 pictures, and it shows only one
girl. She's busy making a decorative lampshade, not
a pipe bomb. So this surely is a story about
gender. Girls had plenty of manual ability a
century ago, but this book speaks the language of
boys.
Today, crime rates among males in their late teens
is skyrocketing. I wonder if that isn't because
we've so stripped socially acceptable risk-taking
from their lives. I remember, with such clarity,
those murderous urges to leap across the eaves, to
climb a tree, to ride my bike too fast down a hill.
And then I wonder if books like this didn't
actually save more boys than they harmed.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
