I was then on the farm to which I had returned, more because I wanted to experiment than because I wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around machinist, I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of earlier days. My father offered me forty acres of timber land, provided I gave up being a machinist. I agreed in a provisional way, for cutting the timber gave me a chance to get married. I fitted out a sawmill and a portable engine and started to cut out and saw up the timber on the tract. Some of the first of that lumber went into a cottage on my new farm and in it we began our married life. It was not a big house—thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high—but it was a comfortable place. I added to it my workshop, and when I was not cutting timber I was working on the gas engines—learning what they were and how they acted. I read everything I could find, but the greatest knowledge came from the work. A gas engine is a mysterious sort of thing—it will not always go the way it should. You can imagine how those first engines acted!
It was in 1890 that I began on a double-cylinder engine. It was quite impractical to consider the single cylinder for transportation purposes—the fly-wheel had to be entirely too heavy. Between making the first four-cycle engine of the Otto type and the start on a double cylinder I had made a great many experimental engines out of tubing. I fairly knew my way about. The double cylinder I thought could be applied to a road vehicle and my original idea was to put it on a bicycle with a direct connection to the crankshaft and allowing for the rear wheel of the bicycle to act as the balance wheel. The speed was going to be varied only by the throttle. I never carried out this plan because it soon became apparent that the engine, gasoline tank, and the various necessary controls would be entirely too heavy for a bicycle. The plan of the two opposed cylinders was that, while one would be delivering power the