Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

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Tools were what I wanted as soon as my term began. Times have changed a lot since then; nowadays an industrial company expects to furnish workmen with all their tools, but in my youthful days the unfailing sign of a skilled workman was the chest of tools he brought to any job. With good reason, he prized them above anything he owned. A good workman was likely to mistrust any tool whose metal had not been tempered by himself. But I had an even better reason for making mine: I lacked the money with which to buy them.

Years after I ceased to need them to earn a living those tools I made were brought from the attic of the old home in Ellis and placed on display in a glass case on the observatory floor, seventy-one stories up in the tower of the Chrysler Building. There, on a clear day, a visitor may look to a horizon nearly forty miles away, and by strolling around a corridor see in one quick panorama hundreds of densely populated square miles of this great land. Yet I am sure that one who neglects the view to gaze, with understanding, into that chest of tools I made, will have learned more about America than one who looks from an observatory window down into the uneven mass of steel, stone and brick that forms the city.