During the winter months Glenn gave his hand to making skate-sails, and became very proficient at it, and when summer came and the boys went on bird-nesting excursions in the woods, he was usually the daring one who allowed himself to be lowered by a rope over the cliff's edge or climbed to the topmost limbs of the big hickory trees. At school, mathematics was young Curtiss's strong point, and when finally he came to pass his final examinations in the high school, he topped his class in that study with a perfect score of one hundred, and in Algebra he stood ninety-nine. It is reassuring, however, to find that in spelling he was barely able to squeeze through with a percentage of seventy-five. Glenn sometimes slipped up on the figuring, but the principle was usually right; he had figured that out beforehand. The boys of Hammondsport used to say that Glenn would think half an hour to do fifteen minutes' work. One wonders what they would have said, if they had been told that in after years he was to think and plan and scheme for a year, and then when he was all ready, to wait hour after hour, day after day, to accomplish something requiring a little more than two hours' time; like his flight from Albany to New York, the first great cross-country flight made in America. When Curtiss was twelve years old his family went to live in Rochester, New York, so that his sister might be able to attend a school for the deaf at that place. He went on working at Rochester after school hours and during vacation time, first as a telegraph messenger, then in the great Eastman Kodak works, assembling cameras. He was one of the very first boys hired by that establishment to replace men at certain kinds of work, and while the men had received twelve dollars a week, Glenn received but four dollars. Before long, however, he had induced his employers to make his work a piece-work job, and had improved the process of manufacture and increased the production from two hundred and fifty to twenty-five hundred a day. He was thus able to earn from twelve to fifteen dollars a week. It was while employed in the camera works at Rochester that Curtiss saved the life of a companion who had fallen through the ice on the Erie canal. When praised for his act of bravery he simply remarked: "I pulled him out because I was the nearest to him."