"John D. Fitzgerald - The Great Brain At the AcademyUC - 4" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fitzgerald John D)

"I'm afraid that wouldn't work," the conductor said.
"The pipe would break when the train went around a
curve."

"Not if they put flexible couplings on it between each
car," Tom said.

A salesman across the aisif began to laugh. "I
think the boy has you there, conductor," he said.

"No he hasn't," the conductor said. "With such a
long pipe the fire under the boiler in the locomotive
would go out."

This stumped Tom until he remembered a photo-
graph of a factory he had seen in a magazine. "I don't
think it would," he said, "because the longer the smoke-
stack the better it draws. That is why they put such high
chimneys on factories."

By this time Tom was so sure his idea would work
that he began to wonder how big a reward the railroad
would give him. The conductor must have guessed what
he was thinking.

"I'm afraid you will never collect that reward," he
said. "In order for a smokestack to work it has to be verti-
cal. Hot air is lighter than cold air. What creates a draft is
the hot air rising to the top. If you bent the smokestack
over horizontally the hot air would just rise to the bend
in the pipe and be trapped there. And as a result you
would have no draft and the fire in the firebox of the loco-
motive would go out."

No wonder Tom didn't mention anything about this
in his letter to me. And no wonder Sweyn chuckled when
he told me about it at Christmastime. It wasn't until I
confronted Tom with what Sweyn had said that I learned
the whole story. And it just goes to prove a fellow has to
listen to both sides of a story to learn the truth.

Tom admitted he was stunned that there was a
flaw in his idea that he felt as if the conductor had hit him
on the head with a baseball bat. And even worse was the




shock to his money-loving heart. And boy, oh, boy, was