CHAPTER IISTRANGE EXPERIMENTS
The shot that rang out in the night was echoed by a yell from Lee, who dropped in a huddle beside the glass wheel. For a moment he crouched there, fighting against a wild desire to crawl back under the clutter of rubbish, and hide. What did it all mean? In the dark silence beyond the open window, what manner of fiend was waiting to shoot down innocent people?
But a muttering and moaning and sounds of difficult breathing came to him from other parts of the room. Uncle Gem, old Pomp, both of them might be wounded, dying! He couldn’t crouch here like a craven and leave them to their fate. Lee forced himself to action. He began to crawl across the room to where he knew there were some matches and a candle. Fumbling around in the dark, he at last got the candle lighted, stood up and looked about him.
Pompey, face downwards upon the floor, was moaning loudly, “Lordy, Lordy, the lightning of the air done struck us, like I knowed it would—”
“Lightning nothing! Don’t you know a gunshot when you hear one?” burst from Lee. “If you’re not hurt yourself, come help me quick with Uncle Gem—he looks like he’s dead!”
“Oh, Marse Gem, is you kilt?” Pomp, who had suffered no injury save fright, rolled to his feet and came on the run, his kindly old black face all distorted with grief.
Indeed Gem Renaud did look like one dead. He hung slumped sideways, half fallen out of his chair. His drawn face was ashen, his hands limp and cold.
But, though Lee searched frantically, he could find no sign of gunshot wound or oozing blood. Together he and Pompey laid the long figure out at ease on the floor, sponged the face with a wet handkerchief, and rubbed hands and wrists. At last old Gem Renaud opened his eyelids with a slow, tired movement. Then he motioned Lee to prop him up into sitting position.
“Just fainted—heart not so good! This shooting—must have been that old fool, Johnny Poolak—taking another shot at the glass wheel—”
“Sh-shooting at the wheel?” stammered Lee. “What for?”
“What for? For superstition mostly,” old Gem Renaud’s black eyes snapped angrily, “and some for meanness, too!”
As Great-uncle Gem regained his strength, he told about this Poolak, the half-wit, full of fool religions and imbued with all the superstitions that ignorant people hold to. The rest of the uneducated squatters here in the village were about on this level too. Once, long ago, when Renaud had been experimenting with his crude electrical devices, a cyclone swept the fringes of the town. Immediately the ignorant villagers coupled the crystal wheel with the disaster, and Poolak, bent on destroying the source of evil, took a shot at the “lightning maker.”
“Evidently,” went on Gem Renaud, “old Poolak has noted your work out here and thinks you’re all set to bring on another cyclone and so has taken another shot at the contraption. If you’ll dig out the bullet that’s imbedded in the wall beyond our wheel of glass, I’ll wager that you’ll find it’s a silver bullet. Silver is the only weapon to down witchcraft according to all the old superstitions, you know.”
That night, before he went to bed, Lee slipped down to the old storage room. There, by the light of a candle, he pried with his knife blade into the wall just beyond the crystal wheel. And sure enough, the bullet that he dug out was not made of lead, but of silver. A rough lump that old Poolak must have molded for himself, melting down a hard-earned twenty-five cent piece, most likely! The silver bullet on his palm gave Lee Renaud a queer sensation, a feeling that he had stepped very far back into a past peopled with eerie fears and superstitions.
The next day Lee moved the whole apparatus of the glass wheel into an unused room on the second floor of the dwelling house. It was safer up there. A fellow didn’t have it hanging over his head that a pious old ignoramus was liable to shoot up one’s affairs again with silver bullets.
The wheel, with its wooden base and brass tubes, was heavy, so Lee carried it over piecemeal. This taking it apart and putting it back together again gave young Renaud a much better knowledge of it than he had had heretofore. There was the hollow brass prime conductor, supported on its glass standard and so fixed on its frame that the metal points set on the ends of its curved out-branching arms nearly touched the glass plate. Lee knew that in some way the metal points collected the electricity generated on the glass whirl of the plate and conveyed this electricity to the hollow brass collector. But there was something else he needed to know.
“Uncle Gem,” he questioned, “why is a little chain hung from the fur cushions so as to just dangle down against the floor—what’s it good for?”
“Gadzooks, boy! You can ask more questions in a minute than I can answer in a year.” Great-uncle Gem tugged at his militant chin-whisker. “Wish I could lay hands on Master Lloyd’s old schoolbook on the sciences. It explains lots. Let me see, though, it goes something like this. By the friction of the whirling glass plate against the fur cushions, electricity is developed—the glass plate becomes positively electrified, and the cushions negatively—”
“Positive, negative—positive, negative,” muttered Lee Renaud, shaking his head as if he didn’t quite take it all in.
“Be quiet, sir!” ordered Uncle Gem testily. “Now that I’ve started remembering this blamed thing, I want to finish my say. Without the chains, the cushions are insulated, and the quantity of electricity which they generate is limited, consisting merely of that which the cushions themselves contain. We conquer this by making the cushions communicate with the ground, the great reservoir of electricity. To do this, we merely lay a chain attached to the cushions on the floor or table. After this connection is made, and the wheel is turned again, much more electricity is conveyed to the conductor. Now, young man, do you see?”
“I—I’m much obliged, Uncle Gem. Reckon I took in a little of it.” Lee blinked dazedly and off he went, still muttering under his breath, “Positive, negative—positive, negative.”
That old science book Uncle Gem was always talking about—if he could only find it, he could learn something. For the rest of the day Lee poked around in the dim and dusty attic high up under the eaves of the big house. Now and again he brought down some volume to submit to Uncle Gem’s inspection. But always Gem Renaud shook his head—no, that was not it, notTHE BOOK.
Then at last Lee found it, a great calfskin-bound old volume stored away at the bottom of a trunk. Even before he carried it to Uncle Gem, he had a feeling this was the right one. It was so full of strange old illustrations, it was so ponderous—of a truth, it had to be ponderous to live up to its name, “Ye Compleat Knowledge of Philosophy and Sciences.”
Gem Renaud’s hands shook with excitement as he took hold of the ancient tome that had played so large a part in his long gone childhood training.
“Here’s a whole education between two covers. Just listen to the index.” Old Renaud began to read, “Astronomy, Catoptrics, Gyroscope, Distance of Planets, Intensity of Sound, Solar Spectrum—”
“And electricity, there’s plenty about that too, isn’t there?” Lee Renaud couldn’t help but break in.
“Yes, yes,” Gem Renaud agreed with him absently, and went on flipping through the pages. “How natural they all look, the old illustrations, the waterwheel, undershot and overshot, the waterchain, the turbine engine! It seems just yesterday that Master Lloyd, the Welshman, had us boys all down at the creek building these mechanisms out of canes and what-not, building them so as they’d really work, to prove to him that we understood what he was trying to teach us.”
“And did you build electrical things too?”
“Why, yes. Master Lloyd sent all the way back to New York to get the proper materials for us.”
Materials from New York! Lee turned away in disappointment. He had been hoping to experiment some with electricity himself, but what had he out here to work with?
Later in the day Lee picked up the old book again and plunged into its strange, stilted dissertation on electricity. He learned that away back in 1745, von Kleist, a priest in Pomerania, had experimented with a glass jar half full of water, corked, and a long nail driven through the cork to reach down into the water. When the old Pomeranian priest touched this nail head to a frictional machine, he got a “shock” that made him think the jar was full of devils. And that ended experimentation for him. But the next year two Hollanders, professors at Leyden University, carried von Kleist’s experiment forward till they developed the Leyden Jar, a practical method for storing electricity.
To Lee Renaud, stumbling upon all this old knowledge, it seemed that he himself was just discovering electricity. For most of the fifteen years of his life, he had merely accepted electricity as an ordinary, everyday thing. Now the real glory of it smote him, thrilled him, inspired him. He longed desperately to try out these primitive experiments for himself. Here on these pages was given the beginning of man’s knowledge of electricity, the beginning of man’s struggle to harness this mighty power into usefulness.
If only he could “grow up” with this marvelous power, understand it, step by step! A large order, indeed! Especially for a youngster stuck off in the backwoods.
But anyway, Lee Renaud flung young enthusiasm and will power into this strange task he was setting for himself.
Already he had the crystal wheel that could make a spark, that could generate electricity. But unless that electricity could be “stored,” it had no usefulness. So it was up to him to make an electrical condenser. But of what?
Umph, well, those old fellows in the past had gone right ahead and used such things as came to hand—and he was going to do the same thing.
Lee studied the chapter on electricity in “Ye Compleat Knowledge of Philosophy and Sciences” until he could almost say it by heart. Jar of fair glass, brass rod “compleated” with a knob, wooden stopper, sheets of substance tinfoil, chain of brass, three coiled springs—these were the things Lee needed to make the Leyden Jar, which was to be his first forward step in electricity.
Desperately he ransacked the place for “laboratory material” and finally gathered together an old metal door knob, an empty fruit jar, a few links of small chain, some tin cans and bits of wire. It didn’t look very scientific—that pile of junk!
But Lee Renaud set his jaw doggedly, and got down to work. Since he had no “substance tinfoil,” he figured that perhaps pieces of tin from old tin cans might do. So he slit down a can, and cut it nearly all the way off from its bottom. The round bottom he patiently trimmed till it would just slip in through the neck of the jar. By rolling the tin sides smaller, he managed to push the whole affair down into the jar, where the released roll of the tin sprung itself out to fit neatly against the inside surface of the glass. Then the outside had to be “tinned” and Lee kept trying until he found a can that was a good tight fit when the jar was pushed down into it.
And there, he had made a start! Instead of tinfoil, the jar was at least covered in tin in the prescribed manner two-thirds of the way up, inside and outside.
Instead of “ye brass rod” that the old book called for, he used a length of wire which he “compleated” with the old brass door knob. He thrust this wire through a wooden stopper he had whittled to fit the mouth of the jar. He had no metal springs, but decided to make the contact with the bit of chain fastened to the end of the wire. When this was thrust down into the jar, the little chain rested on the tin bottom, which was still in part connected with the tin side lining.
Lee Renaud had worked terrifically hard at his job, but now that he stood back to inspect the finished product, it looked more like junk than ever. It didn’t seem humanly possible that such a thing could be an adjunct to collecting power, to storing the marvel of electricity.
Half-heartedly Lee held the knob of the jar to the metal points set against the crystal “friction maker.” After a few minutes of this, he grasped the jar in his left hand and experimentally approached his right thumb towards the knob.
There came a scream and a rattle of glass and tin as the jar was flung from Lee’s hand to smash into a hundred bits on the floor. The boy leaped high in the air and came down, apparently trying to rub himself in six places at the same time.