And that's when it happened. It blew up. The lid hit the ceiling, and water hit the four walls and everything in the kitchen. I was glad Mama wasn't in the kitchen. The noise alone was enough to scare her half out of her mind, and it brought her running in a hurry. And now let us have a moment of silence while you imagine what Mama said to me. Of course I was sorry it happened. The kitchen might never be the same again. And I was sorry to have scared her. But mostly I was afraid she wouldn't let me do experiments in her kitchen again. After the steam cleared out of the kitchen, Mama allowed me to return to the scene just long enough to remove the "thing" to my own room. Then I found that the little rubber tube was stopped up. Steam couldn't get through it. Oh well, air seemed to be much safer and faster anyhow. So I borrowed Papa's tire pump and pumped air into the little toy boiler. That worked just fine. One stroke of the pump and the wheels started turning. Only trouble was, I had borrowed the tire pump without asking, and the next time Papa needed it, it was out of place and he couldn't find it. Again I was in the doghouse. Electricity seemed to be in my life to stay. At age sixteen I owned my first electric train. It was not the steam-locomotive type, but the true original electric-type engine. I bought the train myself and it proved to be a lot of fun. By that time I had known the truth about Santa for a couple of years and I figured he wouldn't be bringing me one. So I started saving up my nickels and dimes and bought my own train. A year or so later I bought my first and only bicycle. It lasted me until I bought my first car. By that time I had begun to believe a fellow could do about anything he set his mind to. So I gave a kid a dollar for an old one-cylinder gasoline engine with its carburetor missing. I knew I couldn't buy a carburetor for it, but I was confident enough, or foolish enough to believe I could make the thing run without one. I was right; I could and I did. That is, I made it run without a real factory-built carburetor. The one I gave it was a small tin can stuffed with rags that were saturated in gasoline. The vapor from the can was the gas that it ran on. I made the little engine pull Mama's washing machine--which she was in the habit of making me pull. Of course it was more work keeping the engine running than it would have been just simply running the washer by hand. But it was more fun my way. And besides, I liked to do things that others couldn't do,--things some mechanics said couldn't be done.