CHAPTER VIIICOMPRESSED POWER
“How far a piece you goner take it?” questioned Lem Hicks.
“You stay here. I’ll amble on down to where the road forks off into the woods. That’ll put us more’n a mile apart. This outfit worked all right just from room to room, but we’re giving it a real try-out now.” Lee Renaud’s voice was full of suppressed excitement.
He wore a contraption, the like of which was never seen before. On his head was a cap of straps that held a pair of radio ear phones in place. On his chest hung a small transmitter that could be adjusted to his lips. Slung against his back, all neatly packed into a sort of knapsack, was a mechanism that operated by means of a crankshaft driven by hand. The whole machine was less than twelve inches square, but so geared that when its hand crank was turned at thirty-three revolutions per minute, its generators made thirty-three hundred revolutions per minute. In Lee’s pocket was folded a miniature aerial.
Lemuel Hicks wore a similar outfit.
Portable radio—that was something ambitious for a youngster to be tackling!
But Lee Renaud had made many steps forward since that night when he had put King’s Cove in touch with the world with his homemade radio. The Cove itself had stepped out a bit in the last months. It had become a place of sharpest contrasts. Though mule and ox carts still creaked down its sandy village road, within its cabins nightly sounded the tinkle of music which radio, that modern of the moderns, plucked from the air of the great outside world. The radios were homebuilt affairs, some the galena crystal type, some the carborundum type, all patterned after Lee’s first attempt—but they got the music, the news, and the latest crop prices. They were waking up the Cove out of its long lethargy.
Over in Tilton, Dr. Pendexter had told a newspaperman of the struggle a lone boy was making to master electricity, and had laughed about the whimsy of radio in that backwash, the Cove.
The reporter knew a good story when he heard one, and wrote up Radio and the Cove—with a strange outcome for Lee Renaud.
That newspaper story was good human-interest news. It was copied by other papers and was read by a far-reaching audience. Then things began to happen.
Touched by the pathos of a boy’s lonely struggle, radio fans here, there and elsewhere packed boxes of material and sent them down to Renaud of the Cove. Americans are generous when human interest hits the heart. Books, wires, tubes—Lee Renaud was almost swamped in the wealth of experimental material. And Lee even had a visit from one of the regular relay station inspectors. There was talk of making the Cove a step in the Relay Organization of America and erecting a sending station there. The talk died down, but out of the affair Lee got in touch with American Radio Relay and was given a call number, “RL.”
With the thoroughness peculiar to him, Lee made no spectacular plunge, but went ahead step by step. As he had followed the beginnings of electricity up through that ancient scientific book, so he now tried to “grow up” along with the moderns, in radio.
The making of a new type radio transmitter was his dream, but he began his work back at the very beginning. Up in his workshop stood copies of some of the very first radio models. There was a primitive looking Hertz Resonator, or Receiver. It was nothing but a hoop of wire, its circle being broken at one point by a pair of tiny brass balls, with a very small air-gap between. When this resonator was set up across a room, exactly opposite the spark-gap of an electric oscillator, and the key of the oscillator was manipulated, sparks shot across the gap in the wire hoop, even though the hoop was not attached to a current. And that was wireless—the first one! In Lee’s collection were also copies of the Branly Coherer and the Morse Inker, and of that amazingly simple radio apparatus with which the inventor Marconi shook the world.
As Marconi had built on the discoveries of Hertz and Lodge and Branly, so Renaud planned to build on Marconi. Where other modern inventors had seen the vision of huge transmitting machines and tremendous power, young Renaud’s vision was to ensmall radio.
Months of work had gone into these outfits that he and Lem Hicks bore on their backs. There was power in them, but of necessity they were crudely built.
And now would this simple mechanism transmit sound for more than the few yards for which it had been tested thus far? Time and again as he tramped along, Lee was tempted to halt, set up his outfit, and seek connection with Hicks, waiting at the village.
But he had set the forks of the road as his distance, and Lem wouldn’t be expecting him before a certain time anyway.
At last he was there, where the rambling country road divided, one branch dropping down into the valley, the other leading over a wooded ridge. It was all a matter of minutes for young Renaud to assemble his outfit, erect the folding aerial above his head, adjust the mouthpiece, and crank the handshaft for power. He was in a tremble as he pressed the buzzer signal and tensely waited for some sign that the sound had gone through.
But no reply came in through the small ear phone receivers. The whole world seemed suddenly still, save for the faint rustle of wind in the leaves, the twit-twit of a bird off in the woods.
“Guess it won’t work. It’s failed!” Lee’s mind was registering dully when, with a hissing “zip” that made him leap clear of the ground, a distinct buzz sounded in the ear pieces.
“H-hello! You—you hear me? You Lem!” Lee shrieked into the little transmitter.
“Hey! Plain as day! You like to blew my head off!” came the delighted voice of Lem Hicks. “Whoop-la, you done made something, Lee Renaud!”
For a spell the two boys passed excited words back and forth through this thing that had made a mile of space as nothing. Then a sudden beat of hoofs down the woods road made Lee leap back towards the ditch. He had hardly cleared the way when a lank bay horse, lathered in mud and sweat, plunged around the bend.
At the sight of this strange apparition in head-strap and ear pieces, with aerial wire rising above its head like horns, the horse shied, snorting and plunging.
“Hi, be you man or devil?” shouted the mud-spattered rider, trying to rein in his animal. “What for be you rigged up to scare honest folk out of the road?”
“I—just trying an experiment,” Lee hastily slipped his head free of aerial harness and the mouth and ear pieces, so that he looked human once more.
“No time for any of your 'speriments to be hindering me,” called the rider over his shoulder, as his horse plunged on down the road. “I’m spreading the call for help. Floods over everything up Sargon Sound! Folks homeless and dying!” and with a clatter of hoofs, he was gone.
He was a surprised rider, though, when he galloped into King’s Cove village some ten minutes later and found that his news had preceded him.
Two little portable radio machines, manipulated by a couple of youngsters, had brought the word faster, ten times faster, than his horse could travel and men were already preparing to set out to rescue the flood sufferers.