Transcriber’s Notes:
In the html version of this eBook, links to larger scale illustrations have been provided where details are not easily visible.Please see the detailed transcriber’s note at the end of this text.
INVENTING
FOR BOYS
BY
A. FREDERICK COLLINS
INVENTOR OF THE WIRELESS TELEPHONE
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS AND
DIAGRAMS
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1916, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved
TO
JOHN ROLLER COLLINS
A THINKER OF THOUGHTS
NEW AND NOVEL
A WORD TO THE BOY
Every boy is a born inventor.
And since you are a boy it follows as the night theday that you have your share of inventive ability andyou ought to make good use of it.
To find out some new way of making or doing athing—for this is what inventing means—is themost fascinating game that I know of to take up afellow’s time and thought and energy.
You may say how about wireless, or star-gazing,or baseball, or shooting, or chess, or any one of adozen other pastimes and sports and I shall be boundto admit that all of them are highly entertaining andsome of them instructive but inventing is all that theothers are and besides it is constructive while theyare not.
By constructive I mean that you take an idea thathad its origin in your brain and this vague, intangibleconception, which takes up no space, has noweight and is not bound by time, you build up stepby step of wood and steel and like materials until atlast you have created something out of nothing, or asnearly as it can be done.
To watch your invention grow, especially if youbuild it with your own hands, from the time you makethe first rough sketch of your idea until it stands completedand in working order, gives you a wonderfulfeeling of pride and satisfaction for you are thecreator of it and this means that you are more thana mere boy, greater than an ordinary man—that youare in very truth a demi-god.
These are the real pleasures of inventing but tomake a success of it you have to drop back to earthagain and take up the mean, the sordid part, and thatis to try to make money out of it. And if you havean invention of merit you will have to forget thatyou are a demi-god and become a hard and fast mortalagain or it will not be long before some other bodyowns it lock, barrel and stock; and then you will havea chan