Astounding Days by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780575121874
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-29T03:00:00+00:00

20 Mechanical Boy

In the last year of his life, H. P. Lovecraft shocked the teenage Willis Conover by regretting that he could not secure some regular employment at any job paying “ten bucks a week or over” (letter dated 23 September 1936). Reading this fifty years later, I too was shocked, until I remembered that at virtually the same time I was managing quite comfortably on just twelve bucks a week – and in London!

As I approached the critical age of nineteen, I do not recall that I had any particular ambition in life, except to read science fiction magazines, look at the Moon through my home-made telescopes, and play with Meccano – the most wonderful toy ever invented up to that time.

With its perforated girders and strips, its angle brackets and flanges, its rods and cranks, its threaded pins and axle rods, and its vast array of gleaming brass gear-wheels, a Meccano set permitted the construction of almost any conceivable piece of engineering. It came in ten sizes or sets, from a very simple No. 1 which could make only crude cars and cranes, to the awesome No. 10 – which could construct anything up to a convincing scale model of the Eiffel Tower, with elevators run by built-in electric or clockwork motors.

The sets could be upgraded by auxiliary kits; if you had No. 3 (which was about where I started) you could turn it into No. 4 by purchasing 3A, and so on. Individual bits and pieces could also be bought separately, and any of my lunch money left after visiting the Woolworth’s magazine racks went to the toyshop which was the local Meccano agency.

One of my boyhood dreams was to own the fabulous No. 10 set, but its cost was so astronomical (twenty pounds, I believe!) that such an ambition was pure fantasy. However, four decades later the dream came true; my thoughtful brother Fred, on one of his visits to Sri Lanka, brought a No. 10 set (in its wooden chest-of-drawers, with all the items neatly laid out in tray after tray). I unpacked it with childish delight, and soon had all the scores of well-remembered bits of cunningly machined metal spread around me on the floor – just like old times. Though I no longer have the manual dexterity, still less the hundreds of hours, needed to build one of the really complex models, I often call on the set when some mechanical problem arises. The last occasion was when I needed a steerable mounting for the laser which I use to terrorize the neighbourhood; and wouldn’t that have seemed pure sf in 1936 – a house-broken death-ray, no less!

While researching the above, I discovered the following item in the Meccano Magazine for July 1979, which couldn’t possibly apply to me:

In an article by Lord Taylor published in the Christmas 1978 edition of the British Medical Journal, the author describes a medical complaint known as the “Presenile Meccano Syndrome”. The “victims” of this obsession apparently

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