The Boy Mechanic

The Boy Mechanic

Author: Popular Mechanics

Year: 1913

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. 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. We read how to counterfeit pennies. Make a wax impression of th