Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a great inventor. I read everything I could about famous men who invented useful things. There were pictures of these men with all kinds of curious machines that they had made themselves. I wanted to make a wonderful machine too, but I didn’t have the tools. I had a few old things that my father let me use, and my mother said I could have any of her old tin pans or cases. So using these I managed to make some rather interesting things, although they were not very useful.
At last, when I was a bright boy of twelve years, my father found a little house in a small town for our family to live in. The most wonderful thing about this house was that there was a large room upstairs over the kitchen and the living-room underneath, where I could work at my inventions. My father set to work and made me some benches, and I brought up all my old machines from the attic, and I was very happy.
Then I wanted a good set of tools. I found an old rusty thing called a lathe. This was an awful thing to get to work right, but after a month I did manage to get it in working order. It was a motor lathe. Do you know what that is? It is something you wind with a rubber band and then it keeps on going of itself to do the work.
Then I got a nice set of real tools on my twelfth birthday. I was a good lad and my parents loved me, or else they would not have given me such a nice thing.
Then we moved to this little house with a garage in the back. It has some nice little rooms over it, and there was a board on two boxes leaning on two benches with legs. I soon had a nice little workshop.
At first, I made an electric rocket. Then I wanted to know how the radio-minimum worked. This pleased my parents very much, for they did not approve of radios. The next thing I made looked very much like a phonograph. This made all the neighbors who came to see me very angry. Then I made a small kites that shot as they flew about. This was really a very dangerous thing, for the kites broke up and the sticks stuck into people. The next thing I made was a very small radio. A friend of mine was a very great mold scientist and I let him have the small machine, for I wanted to keep friends with this man.
Then for a time I did not do anything. Then I invented a thing. This was not a very dangerous thing. In fact, no one was hurt by this kite, for it was made of paper and it blew up slowly and fell down very quietly.
The next thing I made was a real time machine. I was working in my laboratory one morning when I noticed that one of the things I had made seemed to glow with light. Then a most curious smell came from it. Just then a knock at the door startled me from my work.
I answered the door, and there stood a boy about my size.
“You Tommy?” he asked.
“Are you Tommy?” asked he.
“Yes.”
“I’m Tommy’s mother,” he said.
“I’m Chester,” I replied, thinking there had been a misunderstanding.
But this young man, for so he looked, insisted that he was Chester.
I spent all the next morning trying to get him out of my house. Finally, I pretended to fall over upstairs, and when he rushed to help me, I got out of the house and locked the door happily behind me.
But when I came in to my workshop I noticed that all my inventions had disappeared frankly. Finally, I discovered that they were all downstairs in my living-room.
The reason Chester was in my workshop was that he, too, was a wonderful inventor, and had come to teach me the little I needed to know to manage my own time machine correctly. He explained to me where the essentials of this machine were to be found, and took me into the woods to show me how to get the necessary parts to stick to the inner workings.
We worked together for more than a week. I was awakened in the night to find Chester by my side, when a really good idea came into his head. If I was far away and counld not be awaked, I had but to press a certain button in the “time-space-continum” and Chester’s spirit would travel fast over the miles. It did not take him long, in any case, for although he traveled only by leg power himself, I had made enough energy systems to run all my machines.
We started the time machine and went back to the old times before we started keeping proper records. We went to Egypt when the first stones were being laid of one of those wonderful pyramids, I forget which, it was so long ago. After three or four days we went to the time of Aristotle a Greek philosopher who thought a great deal about inventions. Then we went to the time of the famous greek Archimedes. Chester was afraid we might stay too long and so he started for home without telling me and I arrived an hour or two later. In the two or three days he had spent on his journey and not at work we had had a nasty rain-storm and it made Chester very ill.
The next morining he consulted an old chemist he knew, because Chester was but a boy himself and I soon learned he was not much over twenty. Chester had worked with his father who was himself a very celebrated
inventor, and after I left him he and Chester and Chester’s father had worked together on many problems they had been trying to work out. Chester told me I must do the same, but I, fortunately, met Chester’s father before I ever did it; and Chester wrote me a letter telling me some of the most important things he himself had ever worked on.
The idea in his letter was that each inventor should work on new things and not waste time on old ones who had enforced most authorities suspended the constitution. They said to the people: He has most lieutenants generals.
In Chester it was too great a burden and wiped away the question altogether. So Chester went to work for himself and soon developed a knowledge of so many things that soon afterward invented a mechanical thing. This machine did a thousand things at once, or something like that.
This world of Chester’s is in an awful state of things. It is lucky I was not wrecked too, or paralyzed, for if Chester does not soon get well he will be a lot worse than I ever was alone.
Of course I had everything to lose and nothing to gain by telling his father about this. However, this doctor to whom Chester’s father had taken him thinks he is getting on nicely, and he, Chester’s father, does not want anyone around him, and has ordered all doctors off his place. Unfortunately things are not quieting down at all and Chester thinks every night is his last. Chester begged me to go to America, where I would come to in the morning. In eight or ten hours afterwards, if Chester was not too much exhausted, I could be instilled in myself to gain from Chester an idea little about the manufacture of my Improving plant and of its practical application.
So here I am now in America in Chester’s house, away in the mountains. It is Chester’s orders that I have friends come to see me. However, this old place while hiding Chester will soon get tired and give me away. I will come to Chester in a couple of days. Thank Heaven he is going to live.