Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 edition. Excerpt: ... ajax loquitur I, Ajax, whether Telamon or Teucer matters not, otherwise known as Old No. 9, feeling the burden of years, have no compunction--now that I am doomed to the scrap-heap--to indulge in the same vanity as many of my human congeners, and herewith give the principal facts concerning my career and experience, with a few prefatory notes as to my family history.... I am the child of invention and experiment, the epitomised embodiment of centuries of thought. I was ushered into the world by a legion of mechanics and philosophers. My genealogy can be traced to very respectable pagan parentage. Long before the advent of the second Prometheus, a singularly talented Greco-Egyptian, Hero, revealed a secret long hidden by the Egyptians, and demonstrated the power of steam by the strange gyrations he made one of my ancestors, yEolophile by name, to perform. More than a century before that, Archimedes of Syracuse fashioned and wrought out contributory agencies which constitute to this day the principles of mechanical science. After that, I sorrowfully confess that our genealogical record is not quite as clear as I would like; but in the sixteenth century, one of my forefathers, under difficulties of no ordinary kind, owing to the enmity of the priesthood, was made by Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, to go through movements of such a strange and weird character as to provoke the vilest slander and calumny, and at last was interdicted by Mother Church, a power superior to steam at that time. I confess to another relapse until--centuries after--Cugnot, a military engineer in France, yoked one of my ancestors to a cannon, and paced him by catch and rack-and-pinion before the Great Emperor, who, square-headed as he was, knew more of gunpowder than...
