Moments—Early Rising proves a Way out of Difficulties—The Cellar
Workshop—Inventions—An Early-Rising Machine—Novel Clocks—Hygrometers,
etc.—A Neighbor’s Advice.
I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it,
though I had the rules by heart. But when I was about fifteen or
sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge, and
persuaded father, who was willing enough to have me study provided my
farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the
beginning, in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in
the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start
for the harvest-and hay-fields, accomplishing more without a teacher in
a few scraps of time than in years in school before my mind was ready
for such work. Then in succession I took up algebra, geometry, and
trigonometry and made some little progress in each, and reviewed
grammar. I was fond of reading, but father had brought only a few
religious books from Scotland. Fortunately, several of our neighbors
had brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and
read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden
from father’s eye. Among these were Scott’s novels, which, like all
other novels, were strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious
pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus’ “Wars
of the Jews,” and D’Aubigné’s “History of the Reformation,” and I tried
hard to get him to buy Plutarch’s Lives, which, as I told him,
everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book; but he
would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham bread and
anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwoods neighborhood,
making a stir something like phrenology and spirit-rappings, which were
as mysterious in their attacks as influenza. He then thought it
possible that Plutarch might be turned to account on the food question
by revealing what those old Greeks and Romans ate to make them strong;
and so at last we gained our glorious Plutarch. Dick’s “Christian
Philosopher,” which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might
venture to read in the open, trusting that the word “Christian” would
be proof against its cautious condemnation. But father balked at the
word “Philosopher,” and quoted from the Bible a verse which spoke of
“philosophy falsely so-called.” I then ventured to speak in defense of
the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of the
most useful kinds of philosophy.
“Yes, we can,” he said with enthusiasm, “the Bible is the only book
human beings can possibly require throughout all the journey from earth
to heaven.”
“But how,” I contended, “can we find the way to heaven without the
Bible, and how after we grow old can we read the Bible without a little
helpful science? Just think, father, you cannot read your Bible without
spectacles, and millions of others are in the same fix; and spectacles
cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics.”
“Oh!” he replied, perceiving the drift of the argument, “there will
always be plenty of worldly people to make spectacles.”
To this I stubbornly replied with a quotation from the Bible with
reference to the time coming when “all shall know the Lord from the
least even to the greatest,” and then who will make the spectacles? But
he still objected to my reading that book, called me a contumacious
quibbler too fond of disputation, and ordered me to return it to the
accommodating owner. I managed, however, to read it later.
On the food question father insisted that those who argued for a
vegetable diet were in the right, because our teeth showed plainly that
they were made with reference to fruit and grain and not for flesh like
those of dogs and wolves and tigers. He therefore promptly adopted a
vegetable diet and requested mother to make the bread from graham flour
instead of bolted flour. Mother put both kinds on the table, and meat
also, to let all the family take their choice, and while father was
insisting on the foolishness of eating flesh, I came to her help by
calling father’s attention to the passage in the Bible which told the
story of Elijah the prophet who, when he was pursued by enemies who
wanted to take his life, was hidden by the Lord by the brook Cherith,
and fed by ravens; and surely the Lord knew what was good to eat,
whether bread or meat. And on what, I asked, did the Lord feed Elijah?
On vegetables or graham bread? No, he directed the ravens to feed his
prophet on flesh. The Bible being the sole rule, father at once
acknowledged that he was mistaken. The Lord never would have sent flesh
to Elijah by the ravens if graham bread were better.
I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the
Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating,
uplifting pleasure; and I became anxious to know all the poets, and
saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible. Within
three or four years I was the proud possessor of parts of
Shakespeare’s, Milton’s, Cowper’s, Henry Kirke White’s, Campbell’s, and
Akenside’s works, and quite a number of others seldom read nowadays. I
think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good
literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over favorite lines, but
there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter
evenings,—only a few stolen minutes now and then. Father’s strict rule
was, straight to bed immediately after family worship, which in winter
was usually over by eight o’clock. I was in the habit of lingering in
the kitchen with a book and candle after the rest of the family had
retired, and considered myself fortunate if I got five minutes’ reading
before father noticed the light and ordered me to bed; an order that of
course I immediately obeyed. But night after night I tried to steal
minutes in the same lingering way, and how keenly precious those
minutes were, few nowadays can know. Father failed perhaps two or three
times in a whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes,
magnificent golden blocks of time, long to be remembered like holidays
or geological periods. One evening when I was reading Church history
father was particularly irritable, and called out with hope-killing
emphasis, “_John go to bed!_ Must I give you a separate order every
night to get you to go to bed? Now, I will have no irregularity in the
family; you _must_ go when the rest go, and without my having to tell
you.” Then, as an afterthought, as if judging that his words and tone
of voice were too severe for so pardonable an offense as reading a
religious book he unwarily added: “If you _will_ read, get up in the
morning and read. You may get up in the morning as early as you like.”
That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that
somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of
this wonderful indulgence; and next morning to my joyful surprise I
awoke before father called me. A boy sleeps soundly after working all
day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as
if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my
chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won; and when I
held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the
kitchen I found that it was only one o’clock. I had gained five hours,
almost half a day “Five hours to myself!” I said, “five huge, solid
hours!” I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery
I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the
possession of these five frosty hours.
In the glad, tumultuous excitement of so much suddenly acquired
time-wealth, I hardly knew what to do with it. I first thought of going
on with my reading, but the zero weather would make a fire necessary,
and it occurred to me that father might object to the cost of firewood
that took time to chop. Therefore, I prudently decided to go down
cellar, and begin work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I had
invented. Next morning I managed to get up at the same gloriously early
hour, and though the temperature of the cellar was a little below the
freezing point, and my light was only a tallow candle the mill work
went joyfully on. There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar,—a
vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that father had brought from
Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse crooked one that was unfit for
sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my
work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned
corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly. I also made my own
bradawls, punches, and a pair of compasses, out of wire and old files.
My workshop was immediately under father’s bed, and the filing and
tapping in making cogwheels, journals, cams, etc., must, no doubt, have
annoyed him, but with the permission he had granted in his mind, and
doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one o’clock,
he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word. I did not
vary more than five minutes from one o’clock all winter, nor did I feel
any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as
to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious; it was a
grand triumph of will-power over cold and common comfort and
work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours’ allowance of
sleep to five. I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could
have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy. Like Tam o’
Shanter I was glorious, “O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious.”
Father, as was customary in Scotland, gave thanks and asked a blessing
before meals, not merely as a matter of form and decent Christian
manners, for he regarded food as a gift derived directly from the hands
of the Father in heaven. Therefore every meal to him was a sacrament
requiring conduct and attitude of mind not unlike that befitting the
Lord’s Supper. No idle word was allowed to be spoken at our table, much
less any laughing or fun or story-telling. When we were at the
breakfast-table, about two weeks after the great golden time-discovery,
father cleared his throat preliminary, as we all knew, to saying
something considered important. I feared that it was to be on the
subject of my early rising, and dreaded the withdrawal of the
permission he had granted on account of the noise I made, but still
hoping that, as he had given his word that I might get up as early as I
wished, he would as a Scotchman stand to it, even though it was given
in an unguarded moment and taken in a sense unreasonably far-reaching.
The solemn sacramental silence was broken by the dreaded question:—
“John, what time is it when you get up in the morning?”
“About one o’clock,” I replied in a low, meek, guilty tone of voice.
“And what kind of a time is that, getting up in the middle of the night
and disturbing the whole family?”
I simply reminded him of the permission he had freely granted me to get
up as early as I wished.
“I _know_ it,” he said, in an almost agonized tone of voice, “I _know_
I gave you that miserable permission, but I never imagined that you
would get up in the middle of the night.”
To this I cautiously made no reply, but continued to listen for the
heavenly one-o’clock call, and it never failed.
After completing my self-setting sawmill I dammed one of the streams in
the meadow and put the mill in operation. This invention was speedily
followed by a lot of others,—water-wheels, curious doorlocks and
latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer, an
automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a
lamp-lighter and fire-lighter, an early-or-late-rising machine, and so
forth.
After the sawmill was proved and discharged from my mind, I happened to
think it would be a fine thing to make a timekeeper which would tell
the day of the week and the day of the month, as well as strike like a
common clock and point out the hours; also to have an attachment
whereby it could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at
any hour in the morning; also to start fires, light lamps, etc. I had
learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book, but with this
exception I knew nothing of timekeepers, for I had never seen the
inside of any sort of clock or watch. After long brooding, the novel
clock was at length completed in my mind, and was tried and found to be
durable and to work well and look well before I had begun to build it
in wood. I carried small parts of it in my pocket to whittle at when I
was out at work on the farm, using every spare or stolen moment within
reach without father’s knowing anything about it. In the middle of
summer, when harvesting was in progress, the novel time-machine was
nearly completed. It was hidden upstairs in a spare bedroom where some
tools were kept. I did the making and mending on the farm, but one day
at noon, when I happened to be away, father went upstairs for a hammer
or something and discovered the mysterious machine back of the
bedstead. My sister Margaret saw him on his knees examining it, and at
the first opportunity whispered in my ear, “John, fayther saw that
thing you’re making upstairs.” None of the family knew what I was
doing, but they knew very well that all such work was frowned on by
father, and kindly warned me of any danger that threatened my plans.
The fine invention seemed doomed to destruction before its time-ticking
commenced, though I thought it handsome, had so long carried it in my
mind, and like the nest of Burns’s wee mousie it had cost me mony a
weary whittling nibble. When we were at dinner several days after the
sad discovery, father began to clear his throat to speak, and I feared
the doom of martyrdom was about to be pronounced on my grand clock.
“John,” he inquired, “what is that thing you are making upstairs?”
I replied in desperation that I didn’t know what to call it.
“What! You mean to say you don’t know what you are trying to do?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I know very well what I am doing.”
“What, then, is the thing for?”
“It’s for a lot of things,” I replied, “but getting people up early in
the morning is one of the main things it is intended for; therefore it
might perhaps be called an early-rising machine.”
After getting up so extravagantly early, all the last memorable winter
to make a machine for getting up perhaps still earlier seemed so
ridiculous that he very nearly laughed. But after controlling himself
and getting command of a sufficiently solemn face and voice he said
severely, “Do you not think it is very wrong to waste your time on such
nonsense?”
“No,” I said meekly, “I don’t think I’m doing any wrong.”
“Well,” he replied, “I assure you I do; and if you were only half as
zealous in the study of religion as you are in contriving and whittling
these useless, nonsensical things, it would be infinitely better for
you. I want you to be like Paul, who said that he desired to know
nothing among men but Christ and Him crucified.”
To this I made no reply, gloomily believing my fine machine was to be
burned, but still taking what comfort I could in realizing that anyhow
I had enjoyed inventing and making it.
After a few days, finding that nothing more was to be said, and that
father after all had not had the heart to destroy it, all necessity for
secrecy being ended, I finished it in the half-hours that we had at
noon and set it in the parlor between two chairs, hung moraine boulders
that had come from the direction of Lake Superior on it for weights,
and set it running. We were then hauling grain into the barn. Father at
this period devoted himself entirely to the Bible and did no farm work
whatever. The clock had a good loud tick, and when he heard it strike,
one of my sisters told me that he left his study, went to the parlor,
got down on his knees and carefully examined the machinery, which was
all in plain sight, not being enclosed in a case. This he did
repeatedly, and evidently seemed a little proud of my ability to invent
and whittle such a thing, though careful to give no encouragement for
anything more of the kind in future.
But somehow it seemed impossible to stop. Inventing and whittling
faster than ever, I made another hickory clock, shaped like a scythe to
symbolize the scythe of Father Time. The pendulum is a bunch of arrows
symbolizing the flight of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy oak snag
showing the effect of time, and on the snath is written, “All flesh is
grass.” This, especially the inscription, rather pleased father, and,
of course, mother and all my sisters and brothers admired it. Like the
first it indicates the days of the week and month, starts fires and
beds at any given hour and minute, and, though made more than fifty
years ago, is still a good timekeeper.
My mind still running on clocks, I invented a big one like a town clock
with four dials, with the time-figures so large they could be read by
all our immediate neighbors as well as ourselves when at work in the
fields, and on the side next the house the days of the week and month
were indicated. It was to be placed on the peak of the barn roof. But
just as it was all but finished, father stopped me, saying that it
would bring too many people around the barn. I then asked permission to
put it on the top of a black-oak tree near the house. Studying the
larger main branches, I thought I could secure a sufficiently rigid
foundation for it, while the trimmed sprays and leaves would conceal
the angles of the cabin required to shelter the works from the weather,
and the two-second pendulum, fourteen feet long, could be snugly
encased on the side of the trunk. Nothing about the grand, useful
timekeeper, I argued, would disfigure the tree, for it would look
something like a big hawk’s nest. “But that,” he objected, “would draw
still bigger bothersome trampling crowds about the place, for who ever
heard of anything so queer as a big clock on the top of a tree?” So I
had to lay aside its big wheels and cams and rest content with the
pleasure of inventing it, and looking at it in my mind and listening to
the deep solemn throbbing of its long two-second pendulum with its two
old axes back to back for the bob.
One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod, about
three feet long and five eighths of an inch in diameter, that had
formed part of a wagon-box. The expansion and contraction of this rod
was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop iron. The
pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a small
counterweight, so that the slightest change in the length of the rod
was instantly shown on a dial about three feet wide multiplied about
thirty-two thousand times. The zero-point was gained by packing the rod
in wet snow. The scale was so large that the big black hand on the
white-painted dial could be seen distinctly and the temperature read
while we were ploughing in the field below the house. The extremes of
heat and cold caused the hand to make several revolutions. The number
of these revolutions was indicated on a small dial marked on the larger
one. This thermometer was fastened on the side of the house, and was so
sensitive that when any one approached it within four or five feet the
heat radiated from the observer’s body caused the hand of the dial to
move so fast that the motion was plainly visible, and when he stepped
back, the hand moved slowly back to its normal position. It was
regarded as a great wonder by the neighbors and even by my own
all-Bible father.
THERMOMETER
THERMOMETERToList
SELF-SETTING SAWMILL
SELF-SETTING SAWMILL
Model built in cellarToList
Boys are fond of the books of travelers, and I remember that one day,
after I had been reading Mungo Park’s travels in Africa, mother said:
“Weel, John, maybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day.”
Father overheard her and cried out in solemn deprecation, “Oh, Anne!
dinna put sic notions in the laddie’s heed.” But at this time there was
precious little need of such prayers. My brothers left the farm when
they came of age, but I stayed a year longer, loath to leave home.
Mother hoped I might be a minister some day; my sisters that I would be
a great inventor. I often thought I should like to be a physician, but
I saw no way of making money and getting the necessary education,
excepting as an inventor. So, as a beginning, I decided to try to get
into a big shop or factory and live a while among machines. But I was
naturally extremely shy and had been taught to have a poor opinion of
myself, as of no account, though all our neighbors encouragingly called
me a genius, sure to rise in the world. When I was talking over plans
one day with a friendly neighbor, he said: “Now, John, if you wish to
get into a machine-shop, just take some of your inventions to the State
Fair, and you may be sure that as soon as they are seen they will open
the door of any shop in the country for you. You will be welcomed
everywhere.” And when I doubtingly asked if people would care to look
at things made of wood, he said, “Made of wood! Made of wood! What does
it matter what they’re made of when they are so out-and-out original.
There’s nothing else like them in the world. That is what will attract
attention, and besides they’re mighty handsome things anyway to come
from the backwoods.” So I was encouraged to leave home and go at his
direction to the State Fair when it was being held in Madison.
VIIIToC
THE WORLD AND THE UNIVERSITY
Leaving Home—Creating a Sensation in Pardeeville—A Ride on a
Locomotive—At the State Fair in Madison—Employment in a Machine-Shop at
Prairie du Chien—Back to Madison—Entering the University—Teaching
School—First Lesson in Botany—More Inventions—The University of the
Wilderness.
When I told father that I was about to leave home, and inquired
whether, if I should happen to be in need of money, he would send me a
little, he said, “No; depend entirely on yourself.” Good advice, I
suppose, but surely needlessly severe for a bashful, home-loving boy
who had worked so hard. I had the gold sovereign that my grandfather
had given me when I left Scotland, and a few dollars, perhaps ten, that
I had made by raising a few bushels of grain on a little patch of sandy
abandoned ground. So when I left home to try the world I had only about
fifteen dollars in my pocket.
Strange to say, father carefully taught us to consider ourselves very
poor worms of the dust, conceived in sin, etc., and devoutly believed
that quenching every spark of pride and self-confidence was a sacred
duty, without realizing that in so doing he might at the same time be
quenching everything else. Praise he considered most venomous, and
tried to assure me that when I was fairly out in the wicked world
making my own way I would soon learn that although I might have thought
him a hard taskmaster at times, strangers were far harder. On the
contrary, I found no lack of kindness and sympathy. All the baggage I
carried was a package made up of the two clocks and a small thermometer
made of a piece of old washboard, all three tied together, with no
covering or case of any sort, the whole looking like one very
complicated machine.
The aching parting from mother and my sisters was, of course, hard to
bear. Father let David drive me down to Pardeeville, a place I had
never before seen, though it was only nine miles south of the Hickory
Hill home. When we arrived at the village tavern, it seemed deserted.
Not a single person was in sight. I set my clock baggage on the rickety
platform. David said good-bye and started for home, leaving me alone in
the world. The grinding noise made by the wagon in turning short
brought out the landlord, and the first thing that caught his eye was
my strange bundle. Then he looked at me and said, “Hello, young man,
what’s this?”
“Machines,” I said, “for keeping time and getting up in the morning,
and so forth.”
“Well! Well! That’s a mighty queer get-up. You must be a Down-East
Yankee. Where did you get the pattern for such a thing?”
“In my head,” I said.