Fugen eBooks

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.


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