My only firsthand experiences with the Model-T Ford were shocking. Literally.
While browsing an antique barn this past weekend, a rectangular wooden box caught my eye. "No, it can't be," my mind whirred as I turned the relic in my hands. Though grime obscured any official identifying markings, the booth vendor's tag confirmed my suspicions: a Model-T spark coil.
Designed to energize the Model-T's four spark plugs, a spark coil could throw a terrifying blue flame between two wires set an inch apart fired and was. As a high school student and would-be engineer, I possessed one of those marvelous boxes–and it brimmed with opportunity.
Properly deployed, for example, it might quickly resolve congestion around my school locker. The scenario unfolded this way.
I could, I reasoned, conceal the spark coil in my locker with a six-volt lantern battery. Then a furtive push of a secret button would instantly dispatch the devilish blue spark racing down the row of lockers. Anyone touching his locker would naturally be tossed backward by the jolt, leaving the way clear for me to assemble my books in leisure. To avoid suspicion, of course, I would naturally have to momentarily fling myself backwards, feigning the same mysterious shock as the real victims.
I tested the coil this way a few times, dramatically convulsing and flying away from my locker after each press of the button. But the only responses from bystanders were wide-eyed stares of wonderment at my unexplained fits of repulsion. I would eventually discover that my technically deficient scheme was doomed from the outset. In the same way that birds on a power line suffer no shock, neither could anyone along the row of lockers.
This disappointing failure did not condemn the spark coil to an untimely death, however. Instead, another vision of equal usefulness soon began to congeal.
Probably inspired by rogue DNA in the Y chromosome of males, a friend stumbled onto an exciting discovery. Turning off the ignition of a moving vehicle with a manual transmission (leaving it in gear, of course) and then flipping then flipping the ignition back on a few seconds later sometimes produced a ferocious backfire. With the ignition off, the mechanical fuel pump continued to inject gasoline into the carburetor, some of it passing through the engine unburned. The when the engine restarted, this raw fuel might explosively ignite.
In my plan, I reasoned again, this same result could be duplicated without the potential nasty side effect of blowing off the muffler (as I believe Mike Foote once did). Rigged properly, a spark at the mouth of the tail pile should safely ignite any residual raw gasoline, producing a satisfying cross between a machine gun and an afterburner on a jet. Pretty heady stuff for a sixteen-year-old boy.
Thankfully, this experiment also succumbed to never-defined technical deficiencies.
A little information in the hands of a teenage boy is a dangerous tool, and failing to achieve our dreams may be the best possible outcome.
Copyright 2003 James McAlister
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