People were working on horeseless carriages, I could not know what they were doing.

The
hardest problems to overcome were in the making and breaking of the spark and in the
avoidance of excess weight. For the transmission, the steering gear, and the general
construction, I could draw on my experience with the steam tractors. In 1892 I completed my
first motor car, but it was not until the spring of the following year that it ran to my
satisfaction. This first car had something of the appearance of a buggy. There were two
cylinders with a two-and-a-half-inch bore and a six-inch stroke set side by side and over the
rear axle. I made them out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine that I had bought. They
developed about four horsepower. The power was transmitted from the motor to the
countershaft by a belt and from the countershaft to the rear wheel by a chain. The car would
hold two people, the seat being suspended on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There
were two speeds – one of ten and the returned, more because I wanted to experiment than
because I wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around machinist, I had a first-class
workshop to replace the toy shop of earlier days. My father offered me forty acres of timber
land, provided I gave up being a machinist. I agreed in a provisional way, for cutting the
timber gave me a chance to get married. I fitted out a sawmill and a portable engine and
started to cut out and saw up the timber on the tract. Some of the first of that lumber went
into a cottage on my new farm and in it we began our married life. It was not a big house –
thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high – but it was a comfortable place. I
added to it my workshop, and when I was not cutting timber I was working on the gas
engines – learning what they were and how they acted. I read everything I could find, but the
greatest knowledge came from the work. A gas engine is a mysterious sort of thing – it will
not always go the way it should. You can imagine how those first engines acted!

I read in the World of Science, an English publication, of the “silent gas engine”
which was then coming out in England. I think it was the Otto engine. It ran with illuminating
gas, had a single large cylinder, and the power impulses being thus intermittent required an
extremely heavy fly-wheel. As far as weight was concerned it gave nothing like the power
per pound of metal that a steam engine gave, and the use of illuminating gas seemed to
dismiss it as even a possibility for road use. It was intereting to me only as all machinery was
interesting. I followed in the English and American magazines which we got in the shop the
development of the engine and most particularly the hints of the possible replacement of the
illuminating gas fuel by a gas formed by the vaporization of gasoline. The idea of gas engines
was by no means new, but this was the first time that a really serious effort had been made to
put them on the market. They were received with interest rather than enthusiasm an I do not
recall any one who thought was the weight and the cost. They weighed a couple of tons and
were far too expensive to be owned by other than a farmer with a great deal of land. They
were mostly employed by people who went into threshing as a business or who had sawmills
or some other line that required portable power.

Even before that time I had the idea of making some kind of a light steam car that
would take the places of horses – more especially, however, as a tractor to attend to the
excessively hard labour of ploughing. It occured to me, as I remember somewhat vaguely,
that precisely the same idea might be applied to a carriage or a wagon on the road. A
horseless carriage was a common idea. People had been talking about carriages without
horses for many years back – in fact, ever since the steam engine was invented – but the idea
of the carriages at first did not seem so pravctical to me as the idea of an engine to do the
harder farm work, and of all the work on the farm ploughing was the hardest. Our roads were
poor and we had not the There was a rumour that I did and although I had never before been
in contact with one, I undertook and carried through the job. That gave me a chance to study
the new engine at first hand in 1887 I built one on the Otto four-cycle model just to see if I
understood the principles. “Four cycle” means that the piston traverses the cylinder four times
to get one power impulse. The first stroke draws in the gas, the second compresses it, the
third is the explosion or power stroke, while the fourth stroke exhausts the waste gas. The
little model worked well enough; it had a one-inch bore and a three-inch stroke, operated with
gasoline, and while it did not develop much power, it was slightly lighter in proportion than
the engines being offered commercially. I gave it away later to a young man who wanted it
for something or other and whose name I have forgotten; it was eventually destroyed. That
was the beginning of the work with the internal combustion engine.

I was then on the farm to which I had 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. I thought that I could build a serviceable watch for around thirty cents and
nearly started in the business. But I did not because I figured out that watches were not
universal necessities, and therefore people generally would not buy them. Just how I reached
that suprising conclusion I am unable to state. I did not like the ordinary jewelry and watch
making work excepting where the job was hard to do. Even then I wanted to make something
in quantity. It was just about the time when the standard railroad time was being arranged.
We had formerly been on sun time and for quite a while, just as in our present daylight-
saving days, the railroad time differed from the local time. That