# Identify this Autobiography **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [September 29, 2003, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/identify-this-autobiography/204563 "2003-09-29T22:16:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2003, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/identify-this-autobiography/204563/1 "2003-09-29T22:16:23Z")
I read a chapter out of an autobiography when I was younger, and found it interesting, but never got around to picking up the book and I don’t remember who wrote it, nor the title. Anyway, it was written by a man who’d grown up during the horse and buggy era. The chapter I read, talked about a thermometer that the author had invented when he was a kid. It was built into the side of the family barn, and thus could be read from a great distance away. The chapter mainly dealt with him sneaking out at night to build the thing. It also mentioned another project he wanted to work on, which was a giant clock that would be sited in the top of a tree. The author didn’t get to build the clock, however, as his father forbade it, since it would attract too many rubberneckers. Any ideas? ---
**Author:** ![Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Harvey\_The\_Heavy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harvey_The_Heavy)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2003, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/identify-this-autobiography/204563/2 "2003-09-29T22:21:36Z")
WAG: Thomas Edison. ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2003, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/identify-this-autobiography/204563/3 "2003-09-29T22:27:46Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Harvey The Heavy \* > \*\*WAG: Thomas Edison. \*\* Nada. It was by someone I’d never heard of. Edison, it ain’t, as I’d heard of him by that point and time. ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2003, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/identify-this-autobiography/204563/4 "2003-10-06T22:40:01Z")
Anybody else want to posit a guess? ---
**Author:** ![pesch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pesch/32/4925_2.png) [@pesch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pesch)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2003, 12:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/identify-this-autobiography/204563/5 "2003-10-07T00:16:48Z")
You were reading [“The Story of My Boyhood and Youth” by John Muir](http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~tipiglen/boyhoodindex.html). The section you remember from can be found in chapter 7: “Knowledge and Inventions” > [@](#): > > My mind still running on clocks, I invented a big one like a town clock with four dials, with the time-figures so large they could be read by all our immediate neighbors as well as ourselves when at work in the fields, and on the side next the house the days of the week and month were indicated. It was to be placed on the peak of the barn roof. But just as it was all but finished, father stopped me, saying that it would bring too many people around the barn. I then asked permission to put it on the top of a black-oak tree near the house. Studying the larger main branches, I thought I could secure a sufficiently rigid foundation for it, while the trimmed sprays and leaves would conceal the angles of the cabin required to shelter the works from the weather, and the two-second pendulum, fourteen feet long, could be snugly encased on the side of the trunk. Nothing about the grand, useful timekeeper, I argued, would disfigure the tree, for it would look something like a big hawk’s nest. “But that,” he objected, “would draw still bigger bothersome trampling crowds about the place, for who ever heard of anything so queer as a big clock on the top of a tree?” So I had to lay aside its big wheels and cams and rest content with the pleasure of inventing it, and looking at it in my mind and listening to the deep solemn throbbing of its long two-second pendulum with its two old axes back to back for the bob. Fascinating book.