The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

In the meantime, after we got back home to Hamlin, Papa gradually got into the trucking business. The truck replaced the horse in our lives and after a few years we sold our horses. Then Papa began to wonder if a truck would pull a trailer. He had a good wagon he didn't need, so he thought to himself, "Why not make a trailer out of a wagon?" He tried it and it worked. He cut the tongue off short, hooked it behind his truck and hauled cottonseed to the oil mill at Hamlin from gins in Hamlin and from gins in small towns near Hamlin.

While Papa was experimenting with new innovations, I was doing some experimenting on my own in my spare time. Before we got electricity in our home, I had learned that the telephone company was in the habit of throwing away dozens of old batteries from time to time. Most of them were dead, others were sick and dying, but a few of them still had a little life in them. By connecting enough live ones together, I had enough current to light flashlight bulbs.

I had brought back hundreds of feet of small insulated wire from electric blasting caps at Gorman. I strung the wire all through our house and had little night lights in all our rooms even before we got city current. Although the lights were small, they gave enough light to prevent most of the skinned shins which were usually caused by vicious chairs that jumped out and tackled a fellow as he made his way from his bed to the back door on his nightly journeys to the outhouse.

I also had an Erector Set which had a little motor that ran off the old batteries. It came in handy in a lot of my experiments. We heated a part of our house with a wood-burning heater. I didn't like to get up and build a fire on a cold morning. So I got to thinking, "Why not make my old alarm clock light my fire?" One night I rigged the thing up before I went to bed. The next morning when the alarm went off, it started the motor that struck the match that lighted the kerosene that lighted the kindling that lighted the wood that heated the room.

Well, did it work? Sure it worked, cross my heart. But it wasn't practical. I didn't expect it to be. It was more trouble to rig all that stuff up the night before, than it was to build a fire next morning and jump back into bed while the room warmed up. I just wanted to see if I could do it, and I could.

Once I hooked a bunch of those old dry cells to an auto horn and it really sounded loud in the house. Then one night while Joel was away from home, I made a pressure switch and put it under his mattress so that when he got into bed it would honk the horn under his bed. He was out with his girl and I knew he'd come in after we were all in bed, and more than likely all asleep. So I began to have second thoughts about my little scheme. Papa and Mama would be sure to frown on the idea of being waked up in the middle of the night by what would seem to be an automobile coming through our bedroom honking its horn. And I knew they would frown on me for doing it. So I got cold feet and disconnected the thing before Joel got home.

During the 1930's many farm families had battery lights in their homes. They had "windchargers" to keep their batteries charged. The windcharger was a wind-driven generator. The more the wind blew the more it would keep their batteries charged. In 1921, when I was fifteen years old, I made the first wind-driven electric plant I ever saw or had ever heard of. I took a magneto off an old car and changed the wiring in the inside so it would put out an alternating current instead of a jump spark. It wouldn't charge a battery but it would light a flashlight bulb when the wind blew. I mounted the plant on top of our house above my room. I left the light switched on all the time. It burned day and night, if the wind blew. And the brightness of the light was a good indication of how fast the wind was blowing.

After we got city current I did further experimenting and learned more about electricity. For instance, I liked to get a little shock now and then from the city current. And I learned that I could touch the two wires just a wee bit with the tips of my thumbs and fingers and enjoy a little electrical tingle. One day I tied two metal handles onto the ends of two wires so I could get a better hold and enjoy even more shock. I already knew that a tighter grip on the handles would give me a stronger shock. But what I didn't know was that when the shock reached a certain degree of intensity, it would cause my hands to grip even harder, and I found myself unable to open my hands to free myself. Lucky for me, I had tied the wires onto the light fixture hanging in the center of the room. I couldn't open my hands, but I dropped to the floor and pulled the wires loose from the fixtures.

One day Albert found an old sewing machine motor in a trash pile in an alley. I was glad when he decided to sell it to me. That was another one of my dreams come true. I was ready to do more research and playing. The motor did a lot of things for me, but the thing that was worth the most to the family was the fly- chaser I made out of it.

In those days we Johnsons still didn't have screens on our windows and doors. We just barely had windows and doors. Anyway, I took the electric motor and mounted it on a wooden box with its shaft sticking up. Then I fastened a stick to the motor shaft and a fringed cloth to the stick so that the fringe would float three inches above the food on the dining table. When I placed this monster in the middle of Mama's table, she was not at all pleased.