Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 21, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 December 1899 — RAILROAD SPIKE AND ITS LUCK. [ARTICLE]

RAILROAD SPIKE AND ITS LUCK.

Fortune’s Opportunity Develops Out of Man’s Craze for Whittl ng. Opportunity frequently develops from the most trivial of circumstances. A striking instance of this truism is manifested in the case of a man formerly bereft of the good things of life and now riding the crest of financial prosperity. It all arose from his craze for whittling. Sitting one day in the smoker of a Pullman attached to a Western train, he picked up a piece of wood and began idly fashioning it into shape. Perhaps because of the journey and perhaps, too, from the shape of the wood, it began to assume the form of a railroad spike, the kind used hi fastening the iron rails to the wooden ties. When the spike was. completed the car was still traveling on its forward way, so to add to his occupation and make it pass the time away the owner of the inventive penknife began to tunnel the wooden spike on each of its four sidesuntil finished it looked like a symmetrical implement with edges resembling the petals of a flower. “Why don’t you patent that spike?” quietly asked a prominent railroad official of the party as he watched the development of the stick of wood. “Don’t know, I’m sure. I never thought of it. Guess it isn’t worth much anyway,” replied the whittler laughingly. But the idea clung to his memory even if at the time he had smiled it away as incredible. A year later a friend met him in New York bearing on his person unmistakable signs of the dawn of good fortune. “Yes,” he answered, agreeingly, “I owe it all to that wooden spike. I took that man’s advice when I reached New York, had the thing patented and a few weeks later a railroad company paid me SIOO,OOO for the patent. Queer luck, wasn’t it?”