THE TURKEY THAT WENT TO BED
Possibly it may not be diverging too much from dynamite stories to tell of an experience of mine with a steam-cooker, which I invented away back in the eighties.
In this cooker I was able to roast and bake by superheated steam. Sometimes it worked very well. At other times the safety valve gave me a great deal of trouble, being altogether too uncertain in its action.
One day I was sitting alone in the kitchen, steam-roasting a turkey, when dispossessed Bridget, who was waiting in an adjoining room, opened the kitchen door, and took a sly peep at me. I was endeavoring to convince her that the thing was perfectly safe, when, of a sudden, that cooker blew up. The kitchen windows were blown out, the door ripped off its hinges, and the stove demolished.
Fortunately, none of the fragments found either Bridget or me. The oven portion of the cooker, containing the turkey, went upstairs somewhere, through the ceiling. Later developments showed that the turkey had gone to bed in the room over the kitchen.
That cooker was my first patent.