Yankee ingenuity is alive and well in the Androscoggin Valley.

I was reminded of that a few days ago when I was talking with some folks who are doing some tinkering. They are converting diesel-driven cars to make them run on used vegetable oil they get from restaurants.

Tinkering – that’s what they used to call it, but don’t be mistaken. Tinkerers have given us some world-changing inventions. Before you know it, the tinkerers become manufacturers and maybe even moguls of industry.

But on a farm, tinkering is usually associated with a short-term fix for something, or it’s done out of economic necessity or just for the novelty of it.

My father loved to invent (not tinker; that might be too frivolous). When arthritis was beginning to slow him down, he concocted a method of starting his chain saw with his foot. With the saw on the pickup tailgate, an arrangement of rope and pulleys allowed him to stomp down on a hinged pedal.

Another experiment that I marvel at today was his set-up to run the old John Deere tractor on wood smoke. He heard that farmers in Scandinavia had resorted to this method in World War II when gas was scarce.

A small wood stove was set beside the tractor, which was started on gasoline and then switched when the engine was heated up to diesel fuel (called range oil then). On this same principal, my father ran a hose from the stove’s smokestack to the tractor’s carburetor … and sure enough, when he switched off the gas flow, it kept right on chugging on the unburned smoke gases.

I think Dad’s experiment was simply to prove to himself that he could do it. He never mounted a stove on the tractor so it could actually move off under smoke power. He showed a few friends and neighbors how he could run the tractor on smoke, but in a short time the tractor was needed for use under its original means of propulsion.

Wood smoke is a pretty unusual fuel, but steam for automobile power also had its day, and a Lewiston connection, too.

The Stanley Steamer was the famous invention of twin brothers Francis E. and Freelan O. Stanley.

They were born in Kingfield. They had a manufacturing plant in Lewiston, and they … but wait. It wasn’t Stanley Steamer automobiles they built in Lewiston, as stories sometimes say. It was photographic plates for dry plate photography, and that’s how they really made their fortune. Their company expanded to Massachusetts and it soon became one of the leading photographic manufacturers in North America.

In Lewiston, the Stanley brothers were leaders in the industry, and they came up with another innovation -the airbrush.

Sue Davis, president of the Stanley Museum in Kingfield, told me the Stanleys operated their business in the original building of the Sun Journal on Park Street in Lewiston. She said the Stanleys sold the building to their friend Nelson Dingley Jr., a Maine governor in the 1870s and a congressman from Maine, who was an early part-owner of the newspaper and a Lewiston Journal editor for many years.

There have always been tinkerers. Some people say tinkerers are wasting their time, but would any of us dare to say today’s tinkerers aren’t onto something that could change the face of the Earth?

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can e-mail him at [email protected].