_Scale of proportional genius required for each department in benefiting mankind (and yourself) by means of invention_: Two per cent., inventing; seven per cent., getting into shape; three per cent., getting American patent; one-hundredth of one per cent., getting English patent; ten per cent., getting patent through court; twenty-eight per cent., getting the money; forty-nine and ninety-nine-hundredths per cent., keeping it after you get it. [8] Pickering, March 30, 1869, No. 88507. CHAPTER XXIV. HOBBIES. The cycle hobbyist is one of the quaint characters of the fraternity, and he exists in profusion; turns up at all the meets, and always makes his ubiquitous presence felt. Only make a wheel big enough, a lever long enough, or a spring strong enough, and he has you foul. Some of them have pet schemes of storing compressed air in the tubes; others, more practical, make vague hints at a mile a minute with their electrical or steam motors; while others of these embryo inventors would outdo the now notorious Keely with their wonders; and the only surprise is that they would stop to fix the thing to a cycle, when a most diverting amusement could be found in starting the earth around backward or in drawing the poles straight up and thereby making an eternal spring. Such fundamental principles as that a short lever hung in the middle is just as powerful as a long one hung in the same way; that two turns of a small wheel rolls over as much ground as one turn of another twice the size; that there is no more power in a spring than you put into it, and many other like principles, all seem to be forgotten in the general rush to be the first to make a mile a minute on a dirt road. Truly we inhabit a wonderful sphere; only just make gravity pull sideways, and we would have no further use for locomotives. Somehow or other, however, the contrary old gravity continues to haul everything just its own way, and that is just the way we do not care to go, either now or in the distant future. Certainly all would-be perpetual-motion makers must feel that something satanic is working against them in this unceasing pull of gravity in the wrong direction. But to revert to our cycle hobbyist in particular. A friend of the writer’s, a prominent man, intelligent in all other things, once proposed to pull all the Chicago street-cars by having a man in each, continually winding a spring, said spring to drive the car; and he knit his brow in half offence at the suggestion that there would be less danger of the wheels slipping if the spring-worker would get out and pull by the front platform.