9. Boy, mechanicked
When my son was very young, my parents and sister had a tendency to buy gifts for him that were for a much older child, a tendency owed to some combination of unfamiliarity or forgotten experience with small children (which I shared until I had my own) and projection of their own fantasies about what he would become. None of their gifts, however, topped the shotgun that a family friend gave my son when he was only three. It was a surprise for all of us! I'm not anti-gun on principle, but I do have reservations about guns in the home where children have access to them, and it would at least have been nice to be consulted about this. Still, the gift wasn't without some real thought, as it was actually the return of a gun given to this friend by my dad, who hadn't used it since he was a kid in the early 50s hunting game birds and rabbits in the farm fields next to his town, something he and my brother would do after walking down the neighborhood street that led to those fields with their guns hoisted over their shoulders. Anyway, probably some of the family gifts to my son remain buried in storage, where we put them awaiting the day when they would be appropriate, and are now age inappropriate in the opposite direction. But one has sat on a bookshelf in our spare bedroom since my dad gave it: a 4-volume set called The Boy Mechanic, a collection of Popular Mechanics articles from the first decades of the 20th century that were geared towards their young male readers.
For various reasons, I haven't hooked my son on the joys of tool use the way my dad did me, and so this set of books has never held any appeal for him. Indeed, three of the volumes are still wrapped in plastic, and probably I'm the one who took the plastic off of volume one. But I happened to pick it up recently, curious to what it contained, thinking maybe it would be a primer for all sorts of mechanical arts that I am increasingly interested in but with respect to which I remain but a boy as far as my knowledge of them goes. The books turned out to be useless in that regard, but they are stunning for what they are.
To begin with, starting off the first volume is a page which contains only this text:
WARNING
This is a reprint of a book compiled in the early 1900s. The book describes what was recommended to be done in accordance with the knowledge of the day.
It would be advisable to treat all corrosive, explosive, and toxic materials with much greater caution than is indicated here, particularly any materials that come in contact with the body.
Similarly, some of the recommended projects were dangerous then and remain so now. All of this material should be regarded with a judicious eye and necessary precautions taken.
This warning neglects to mention that within the pages of The Boy Mechanic are entries on p. 126 for treating acid burns and on p. 283 for protecting fingers from chemicals. But the number of acid- and chemical-involving projects one encounters before getting to these entries is considerable.
When I showed this warning to my wife, it reminded her of a reading primer we have that my dad had used in the 40s, in which the children in the book's pictures and stories, supposedly the same age as the first-graders encountering them, walked around with large hammers and handsaws, engaged in all sorts of construction work. And probably more than a few of those first-graders were being educated about such work at home. This sort of cavalier attitude towards risk and assumption that kids could and should make things was still around even when I was in kindergarten (as I mentioned in another post), where indoor play involved pounding real nails into wood with hammers and outdoor play had us digging up the ground with real (albeit kid-sized) shovels. But I don't recall saws. Or corrosive, explosive, or toxic materials.
When I showed this warning to my now teenage son, he became, perhaps unsurprisingly, rather more interested in the books than he had been to date. And, what would have been more gratifying to my dad, he showed interest in some of the actual projects. But skimming through, it's hard to see which ones might be both interesting and actually doable, for despite the titular youth of the project-doer, most of the interesting ones seem to require access to materials and tools and knowledge of how to work with them that are beyond the reach of most adults, myself included. Was it really so different a hundred years ago? It's not that it's inconceivable that a few boys would have had the capacity to build their own gasoline engine (p. 207) or tangent galvometer (p. 150) or small bench lathe made of pipe fittings (p. 316) or etched copper picture frame (p. 414) or ice yacht (p. 307). But were there really that many? Enough to make for a regular feature in the magazine? Perhaps many of these were chosen by editors from published projects that were not originally youth-oriented in order to sell the books on their own. And I suppose that many of the projects needn't actually be doable, just exciting to read about. After all, how many of us who gorge on DIY magazines and YouTube videos actually set about doing the projects we're shown? It's fantasy fodder, and in the case of The Boy Mechanic, it was probably partly intended as aid and inspiration to encourage boys to pursue vocational or engineering work in high school and beyond, so that one day they actually could do the things they read about. And, to be fair, amidst all of the high-skill and -resource projects are magic tricks, tips for how to carry books, and other more achievable and useful projects a boy might occupy himself with.
It's a little funny that the title is so clear in the maleness of its intended audience, for many of the projects in the book came from reader submissions, and a not insignificant number of those are from female readers. But the title of the book reflects the sentiment of the time, that mechanical stuff is for boys, and girls are assumed to be interested in and good at other things. That gendered division of work still is with us, of course. Even in my overly professored household, my wife is drawn to work involving fabric, thread, ink, and paper, while I take on most things involving metal and wood. Food-related work – cooking, preserving, and gardening – is where we meet in the middle. It's also funny that The Boy Mechanic, for all its boyishness, has a subversive queer thread running through it. A reader could come away from this first volume knowing how to make a sewing bag (p. 386), how to clean jewelry (p. 353), how to create a perfume-making outfit (p. 363), and how to make a ladies handbag (p. 213). Although where one is to get Russian calf modeling leather is anyone's guess.