Judge, 1919-11-15 · page 11 of 36
Judge — November 15, 1919 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "The Gasoline Engine" by Edgar Mayhew Bacon This is a humorous essay satirizing the unreliable gasoline engines of the early automobile era. Bacon describes owning a pathetically weak engine whose only reliable feature was its exhaust—which he compares to a "mid-Victorian heroine" prone to fainting fits. The satire mocks both the engine's incompetence and the era's fascination with this new technology. Bacon suggests absurd uses for the exhaust: creating fake champagne "pops," timing jazz music, waking farmhands, impressing neighbors, or even sending Morse code love messages to distant girls. The final joke—sending the exhaust to the Senate—suggests Congress is already so loud and chaotic that one more noise wouldn't matter. The accompanying illustrations (by G.B. Inwood and Norman Anthony) show domestic scenes unrelated to engines, typical of *Judge*'s light satirical style. The automobile exhaust represents early 20th-century technological frustration before engines became reliable.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
The Gasoline Engine By Evcar Maynew Bacon SCIENTIFIC journal offers a A prize to anyone who will tell it what to do with the exhaust of a gasoline engine. 1 am sending the information to because the scientific journal hampered by a slavish re; calities, and besides J like Jupce’s regular rates hetter. If the editor of the scientific journal has a gasoline engine I am sorry. for him, I had one once. It was the most anemic piece of furni- ture that can be imagined. Its ex- haust was the only thing about it that you could bank on. It was per- fect and perpetual. That engine cculd get exhausted readily as a mid-Victorian heroine. When its job 1s to saw wood it would sob and lic approach of a stick as y's wrist. armers for several miles around used to gather and sit on the wood pile whenever I tried to start that engine. 1 suspected at first that they sympathized with that ex- hausted feeling, but I fi found that I was inno- cently running a domestic Monte Carlo. The betting was on the turn of the fly wheel. After that discove Drawn by G. B. INwoop “Tullo, Elsie! I just had some choc'late cake, an’ if we hurry ye can kiss me ‘fore mother makes me wipe my mouth.” “19 s c ing)—“The Hours I Spend With Thee, Dear Heart.” The Girl (to herself) —Yes, that’s all he does spend! my fortunes mended considerably. Before that I had tried everything for that exhaustion—language and everything. mmebody has just suggested that I am on the wrong tack. That the scientific journal doesn’t mean that tired feeling, but the loud noise with which the engine tries to conceal the fact that it is shy on effi- ciency. How about using it to reduce the cost of living? One blast ought to furnish about one thousand syn- thetic pops for magnums of near-champagne. In ners it might be kept in cold storage for nimate Xmas bon-bons. Or it might be judiciously applied to mark the frequent changes in tempo in jazz music, the same effect that is now pro- duced by smashing the trombone on the piano. There are lots of things one might do with that exhaust. I got rid of mine by sticking the junk man with the engine. The more one thinks of this matter the more sug- gestions come. That exhaust may be used to get the hired man up in the morning; to make the neighbors think you own an automobile; to get square with th fellow who has a cornet; to call the cows; to scare the cows away again. How about applying the Morse system to it and sending sweet love messages wafting over the landscape and far away—particularly far —to the deafest of the only girls you r— a long time—wafted messages? Try it some e. It may endear you to her family Of course one might clothe the exhaust with some sort of Frankenstein corporeity and dispatch it to the Senate at Washington, D. C., but one fears that it would there lose all distinction and be overwhelmed in that Mecca of loud noises. Semaaliiconerc-=-eifcesnmnatemeeneantteera