Debt was an ugly word and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the fifteenth of the month was a debt. The word had connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor. Olive, who truly believed that her family was the best in the world, quite snobbishly would not permit it to be touched by debt. She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbors had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.

..."So, do we repeal the Invention Secrecy Act? Well, that will never happen, nobody will risk their career voting for it. They'll say, 'some inventions need to be hidden for national security.'

Whenever you hear that phrase 'national security' remember, it's not your security they're protecting it's theirs. The solution is simple, but it's not one that inventors want to hear: If you create a free energy device that you can prove works DO NOT PATENT IT, publish your invention anonymously on the internet and make it freely available to everyone.

• Old Saxon - strom
• Old Norse - straumr
• Danish - strøm
• Swedish - ström
• Norwegian - straum
• Dutch – stroom