Every small boy wanted to be a steam engine driver when they grew up in the old days, including me. There's something very special about them - the noise, the smell, the steam coming out everywhere.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.
You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.
I wanted to be a bus driver when I was a kid. I look at bus driving through the eyes of a little boy. I see it as glamorous.
Every little kid has always wanted to be a race car driver. This gets some of that out.
As soon as I have got flying to perfection, I have got a scheme about a steam engine.
My uncles, who are farmers in Minooka, Illinois - I grew up with them and their pickup trucks and mustaches, and to me that was masculinity: big hairy sweaty guys who could pick up a bus.
I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
In high school, all my friends' older brothers had these cars. I had a number of friends whose brothers collected Dodges and Plymouths and some of the coolest cars I've ever seen when I was a kid. I was just flabbergasted.
I had a hundred things I wanted to be, but when I was 13, I wanted to be an inventor. I wanted to improve the blow-dryer because it takes so long to blow-dry your hair, and it's just a waste of time. I wanted to invent the therm-alarm, which would have you throw your sheets off in the night when you got too hot.
I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.
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