What I Saw
the Almighty didn't want my name to appear next to theirs.
The first lessons I received about aeronautics were given to me by our great visionary: Jules Verne. From 1888, more or less, to 1891, when I left for Europe for the first time, I read, with great interest, all the books of this great seer of air and submarine locomotion. A few times, in the verdant years of my life, I believed in the possibility of realization of what the fertile and brilliant novelist told; moments later, however, the practical spirit awoke in me, which saw the absurd weight of the steam engine, the most powerful and lightest I had ever seen. At that time, I only knew the one existing in our farm, which was of a fantastic aspect and weight; so were the tractors my father had ordered from England; they pulled two carts of coffee, but weighed many tons... I felt a whiff of hope when my father announced me that he was going to build a railroad to connect the Farm to the Mogyana Company station; I thought that in these locomotives, which had to be small, I would find a base for my machine with which to realize Jules Verne's fictions. This did not happen; they were even
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