Excerpt from Enduring Courage by John F. Ross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On Sundays his mother would give him a quarter, and he would take the electric trolley north to Olentangy Park on the outskirts of town, where he gobbled down Cracker Jacks and rode a wooden roller coaster. He particularly enjoyed fourteen-year-old Cromwell Dixon’s crazy contraption, the Sky-Cycle, which often floated high above the park, its creator precariously astride a horizontal pole hung beneath a 32-foot-long football-shaped hydrogen balloon. Squinting into the bright summer sky, Eddie watched him pedaling furiously to turn a propeller, imagining himself at the controls, free for long minutes from the earth.

When a light breeze blew the Sky-Cycle beyond Olentangy’s confines, Eddie would chase it through the neighborhoods. The whole world—not just the fitful zephyrs brushing over Olentangy Park—was crackling with change and possibility. Newspaper reports had recently appeared about a couple of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, only 70 miles away, who had roused their engine-powered machines above the dunes off North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound. Across America, independent inventors were heroes, the imaginations of most every boy fired by stories of Edison’s electric light, Marconi’s radio, Eastman’s camera, and Bell’s telephone. In 1910, dime-novel entrepreneur Edward Stratemeyer packaged this spirit of youthful inventiveness into one of fiction’s most enduring characters: Tom Swift, the peppy, hyperoptimistic boy supergadgeteer, whose backyard tinkering swept him into a wonderland of dirigibles, submarines, and electric cars. In spirit, Tom—“Swift by name and swift by nature”—stood for Eddie or any one of millions of their American brethren. Invention and tinkering had simply hijacked the country’s imagination. As Peck squarely put it at the turn of the century, the typical American boy “will investigate everything in the way of machinery, even if he gets his fingers pinched, and learns how to make the machine that pinched him.”

Such motivations sent Eddie into his own backyard to construct a perpetual motion machine. Under the light of a coal lamp at night he wound springs and fooled with bits of machinery. “My idea was a series of springs—as one unwound, the other would wind up and so forth, carrying the power with it and the balance.” He would have to engage the problem with his hands before he finally understood why it could never work. That didn’t stop him from trying to fly off a roof on a bike under a large, tightly gripped carriage umbrella. Fortunately the mound of sand that he and a friend had carefully heaped up beforehand broke his precipitous drop when the umbrella immediately turned inside out.

Ordinary Americans did not just thrill to Jules Verne’s fantastic world, in which Captain Nemo cruised the world’s oceans in a palatial submarine, but believed that they themselves were drawing upon a multitude of world-changing inventions—in essence, becoming their own Nemos. Eddie carried around with him a pocket tool set—an adjustable wrench, a screwdriver, and pliers—all wrapped in a piece of leather; sufficient, if you commanded his natural skills, to most any task. At no time, perhaps, since the generation that fought the American Revolution had U.S. citizens felt so empowered to create a world to their own designs.

After his marble-carving gig, Eddie took a job cleaning cars with the Pennsylvania Railroad, which morphed into a spot in the machine shop, where he learned how to turn ungainly pieces of rough steel into beautifully symmetric forms. The men liked to tease the youngster, sending him around the shop in search of half-round squares or left-handed monkey wrenches. In return for the laughs and raspberries, this resilient, good-natured kid, who took their ribbing with a wide grin, received valuable lessons at the lathe, and help with making canes and baseball bats during lunch break. His appreciation of the beauty of fine-precision parts and well-designed machines grew into a lifetime love. He might well have stayed there but for a misadventure he did nothing to precipitate when a wheel popped off a cart stacked high with lumber as it passed his workstation. The whole load toppled onto him and pinned him to his lathe. They urgently pulled off the boards to find the youngster’s shin badly lacerated but Eddie otherwise okay.

Excerpted from Enduring Courage by John F Ross. Copyright © 2014 by John F Ross. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.