Collins Frederick A. The Boys' Book of Engine-Building

Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1918. — 261 p. With Drawings by the Author.How to Make Steam, Hot Air and Gas Engines and how they work, told in Simple Language and by clear pictures.
I hope you will read these few pages about a boy who built model engines along in the late 7o's out in the Far West and at a time when and a place where it was next to impossible to get materials for his work. This boy was Bion J. Arnold, now our foremost American engineer. He was only thirteen years old when he built his first engine-and it worked, too. It was a little horizontal steam affair about seven inches long, and he went about building it in the right way-that is he made patterns for the chief parts, cast them in lead and put them together with the tools of a kindly disposed gunsmith. When Bion was fourteen, he built a vertical steam engine over a foot high and here is where his genius showed itself again, for he used a piece of old iron pipe for the boiler, a discarded hub from a wagon wheel for the fire-box, a wheel from a valve, which had been thrown away, for the flywheel, a gas-cock some one had given him for the throttle valve and, finally, he riveted the fire-box to the boiler with bolts which he had forged with his own hands.