As a boy I spent many summer vacations at my grandparents house on White Trout Lake in Tampa, Florida.  Every afternoon at about 3:00 my sister and I were told we had to take a nap (I now realize that it was because the grown-ups were the ones that needed the naps!).

In the room we stayed in there was a small collection of books, most of which had been used by my father and uncle when they were growing up.  One of these books was "Every Boy's Book of Hobbies" by Cecil H. Bullivant, published in 1912 by Thomas Nelson & Sons, New York.

The book contained a variety of projects that could be undertaken by young men of the time using tools and materials found around the house or obtained at small expense.  I read many of these articles over and over to study how/why they worked.

One of these articles was "An Automatic Fountain" which depicts a fountain that seems to embody perpetual motion (well, to a young man it seemed so ...).

Members of an email list I am on showed interest in the fountain so I have reproduced the pages shown below.  In addition I have created two "pdf' files which can be downloaded:

        Click here to download the large version (Large 1,968 Kb) or
        here to download a smaller version (707 Kb).

        (personally I can't tell the difference in the two files above, but then, it's the first pdf file I've ever created)

Here are images of the 12 pages in the article:

(click each page for larger version)