CHAPTER VTAPS
“What’s this? What’s this?” A rough voice from the doorway startled Lee so that he nearly dropped the glass jar half full of salt water, in which he was just placing a strip of tin and a long stick of charcoal.
The man behind the big voice was a little wizened, gray-headed fellow, with twinkle lines around his eyes that rather belied his gruff manner.
“Well, well, well!” boomed the visitor. Lee thought in amazement that he had never heard such a vast bellow proceed out of such a little man. “Um, yes, you must be Lee, Gem’s nephew. He told me I’d find you up here. I’m Doctor Pendexter from Tilton, old friend of Gem’s. Just now heard about his bum leg and came over to see him. Gem, consarn him, never does write to anybody. Looks like you’re getting ready to generate some sort of power. Used to dabble in electrics myself, I have no time for that nowadays. What’s that you’re up to?”
“I was just following out the Volta experiments as best I could.” Lee touched the jar with its half load of salt water. “Was trying tin and charcoal for electrodes.”
“Um! Go on with it.” Dr. Pendexter drew up a chair close beside Lee’s work table.
At first Lee was embarrassed at having an older head watching over his crude tests. However, as he struggled sturdily on with what he had planned to do, interest in the work claimed his attention till there was no room left for feeling self-conscious.
With a firm twist at each end, Lee proceeded to connect the tops of his two electrodes with a bit of wire. There, he had done it as Volta said. And if Volta were right, there ought to be electricity passing from one of his crude electrodes to the other. He’d test it in his own way. With a quick clip, he cut the wire in the middle, setting the ends apart but very nearly touching. He laid a finger on the gap. A tiny prickling shot through his finger. The thing was working feebly, but working enough to show that the theory was right. Fine—he’d learned another way of making electricity! Then his excitement quickly faded, leaving him looking rather doleful.
“What’s the matter? Didn’t it work? It ought to. I’ve dabbled at that experiment myself. It always works—”
“Yes, sir, it worked. All the old tests I’ve tackled so far have. But just something to play with is as far as I seem to get. I can’t find out how to apply the power, how to make some use out of it.”
Dr. Pendexter’s quick ear caught the note of tragedy in the boy’s voice. To the man came a sudden realization of what a struggle this boy must be having as he strove alone to fathom the almost unfathomable mysteries of electricity. Being a man of action, Pendexter applied a remedy in his own way.
“Consarn it all,” he roared, “don’t look so blasted blue! You’re coming on fine, as far as you’ve gone.” The little Doctor cast a quick eye around the room at the bottles and jars, the Voltaic pile and the crystal wheel with its renovated gear. “The trouble is, you’re going sort of one-sided with nothing but one old book to learn out of,” and he flipped the calfskin cover of “Ye Compleat Knowledge” with his forefinger. “You’ve got to the point where you need something modern to study. What do you know about magnets and magnetism and electromagnets?”
“N-nothing,” stammered Lee Renaud in confusion.
“Umph!” from the Doctor. “Well, you’ve been missing out on one of the biggest things in electricity. The electromagnet, that’s the king pin of ’em all!”
“I’ve seen little magnets, sort of horseshoe-shaped bits of metal that you can pick up a needle or a tack or the like with. Didn’t know magnets had anything to do with electricity!”
“You better be knowing it then!” The Doctor banged the table with an emphatic fist. “The electromagnet is the thing that puts the 'go’ in telegraphy, the telephone, this radio business. Say, I’m going to send you a book about it, a modern one. You study it!” And with that parting command, the wiry, roaring little man was gone.
Staring at the empty chair drawn up close beside his latest experiment in tin and charcoal, Lee Renaud had the feeling that he had only imagined Dr. William Pendexter. The wizened little man with the outlandish voice was queer enough to have been generated out of a jar by one of these old electrical experiments.
A few days later though, Lee had good proof that Pendexter was very real—and a man of his word, too. When Lee made a trip down to the village store for a can of kerosene, Mr. Hicks, who was postmaster as well as storekeeper, shoved a package over the counter to him and said, “Today’s mail day.” (Mail came only three times a week to this little backwash village of King’s Cove, and then never very much of it.) Mr. Hicks thumped the packet importantly, “This here come for you. Must amount to something, 'cording to the passel of stamps they stuck on to it.”
It most certainly did amount to something. When he got off to himself, Lee’s hands trembled so that he could hardly tear the wrappings away. Ah, there it was—a big, fat, red-bound volume, with gold letters, “The Amateur Electrician’s Handbook.”
There was information enough within those red covers to set Lee Renaud off on a brand new set of experiments. From a battery made of a trio of glass jars containing salt water, each jar holding its strips of zinc and copper, and fitted with wiring, he charged a bar of soft iron until it was magnetized—but this would stay magnetized only so long as the current was put to it. Then he electrified a bit of steel—and it became a permanent magnet.
Lee became more ambitious in his experimenting. He was after power, something that would generate real movement. And so he rushed in where a more experienced hand might have been stalled by the lack of material. But Lee Renaud staunchly refused to be stalled, even though his supply of working material was nothing much beyond bits of tin, iron, some barbed wire, old nails, broken glass, and pieces of brass salvaged from old cartridges.
And out of such junk, Lee proposed to make himself an electric motor!
Well, that was the next step for him. If he were going forward, he just had to make a motor.
His first attempt was the simplest of the simple. According to directions and diagrams in the new red book, he took current from his Voltaic Cell and put it in a circuit through a loop of wire which lay in a strongly magnetized field. The push of power in the lines of magnetic force, through changes in the connections, set the loop to revolving. And there it was, his electric motor! Very sketchy, very rudimentary indeed, but it worked in its own crude way.
Later, and after much study, he decided to attempt a real little dynamo. This, by comparison with number one, was to be an elaborate affair, comprising a loop of wire revolving between the poles of a horseshoe-shaped permanent magnet, with two half-cylinders connected to the revolving loop of wire and touched at each half-turn by stationary metal brushes. The metal brushing was to turn the alternating current into a direct current. In the making, Lee ran into all sorts of troubles, mostly due to his poor materials. But he kept on, and at last produced something that sputtered and coughed and was as cranky as a one-eyed mule. But it ran part of the time—enough to teach Lee more about electric motors than all the reading in the world could have done.
A few weeks later, Dr. William Pendexter drove his prim little car out again to see how Gem Renaud’s leg was progressing—which really wasn’t necessary for old Mr. Renaud was coming on finely. He might just as well have admitted that the real reason for driving twenty miles to King’s Cove was to see how Lee and electricity were hitting it off.
The wiry little man roamed all over the Renaud place and roared his approval of Lee’s cranky, balky dynamo. When he was climbing into his car, he called, “Hi there, Lee! I’ve got to go to Tilton and back to bring something I want for Gem. Want to go for the ride?”
To Lee, who for months now had been stuck away down in the backwoods Cove, this trip to town seemed to be bringing him into another world, the progressive world that he had slipped out of for a spell. Drug stores, banks, cars, tall poles for telegraph and telephone wires, electric lights—seeing all these again made his dabblings at Voltaic Cells and the crystal wheel seem truly to belong to a long-gone, primitive period.
Pendexter got out at the railroad station, motioning for Lee to follow. He wrote off a telegram, handing it to the operator. All the while Lee stood like one transfixed, staring in fascination at the telegraph instruments on the dispatcher’s table. Almost without knowing it, the boy was mentally calculating on the coils of wire, the shining brass. Electricity ran that thing; here was power hitched up and working.
Pendexter jerked a thumb in the boy’s direction when he had caught the operator’s eye.
“Plumb batty on electricity!” For once the Pendexter roar was silenced to a mere whisper. “Found him down there in the Cove experimenting all by himself. Consarn it, John Akerly, tell him something about electricity! You know plenty. Got to go by the house for a package—be back.” And the Doctor disappeared.
Akerly reached out a long finger and suddenly clickety-clicked the instrument. “Want to know something about that?” he queried sharply, but with a grin wrinkling up his leathery face.
“I—what—yes, sir!” The click and the voice had startled Lee.
“Know anything about batteries?”
“I made some that worked—sort of. You mean putting two metal strips in an acid solution so as to produce an electric current. Then a lot of jars with this stuff in ’em, and wired up right—you set ’em together and that forms a battery—”
“You’ve got it, kid! With that much in your noodle, I reckon I can pass on to you something about this telegraphing business. To begin with, I’ve got a battery here, with a wire from one pole of it passing through my table and going all the way to Birmingham. Say that this wire came all the way back from Birmingham and connected with the other pole of my battery, what would that make?”
“An electric circuit,” answered Lee. “One that—”
“Yes, one that included the Birmingham station in its circle. Only there isn’t any return wire—”
“Then it isn’t a cir—” Lee began.
“Yes, it is! Think, boy! This old earth of ours is a mighty good electric conductor—”
“Of course!” Lee was crestfallen that he hadn’t thought of that. “I’ve grounded wires myself, and made the circuit.”
“All right then. We’ve got our wire going to Birmingham, grounded at the Birmingham station, and the earth acting as a return for our current. Now we’ll say this circuit is fixed around some instruments on my table, and fixed around the same sort of instruments on the table in Birmingham. Well, when I start tapping my telegraph key—making and breaking the circuit—won’t this current be stopped and started at Birmingham just like it is here? Huh?”
“Yes—an instrument on the same circuit.” Lee cocked his head sidewise in deep thought. “It just naturally would be.”
“Well, son, that’s telegraphy!”
“Telegraphy! Great jumping catfish! Is that all there is to it?”
“Er-r, not exactly,” said Akerly dryly. “There’s the relay, or local battery circuit, the electromagnet sounder, special stuff and duplex work, signals, the code to be learned.” The dispatcher paused a moment in his recital, pulled a battered book out of a drawer, opened it at a page full of queer marks, and added, “Here’s the code.”
Lee bent over the page. “I see,” he said, then added with a wry grin, “or rather I don’t see! How do you hitch all those little signs up so that they mean something on an instrument?”
“All right—it’s like this. I’ll tap the telegraph key for a tenth of a second. That means I’ve let the current flow for a tenth of a second. We call that a 'dot.’ A three-tenths of a second tap makes the 'dash.’ Put 'dot,’ 'dash,’ 'dot’ together in all sorts of combinations, and you’ve got the code. When the fellow at the other end of the line knows the code, he can understand what you’re tapping to him.”
A couple of hours later when Pendexter breezed back into the office, he found the two of them still at it, with the talk switching back and forth about magnetic rotations and cycles and frequency, about multiplying powers and symmetry and resonance.
“Looks like you two sort of speak the same language,” rumbled the Doctor. “Didn’t mean to leave you at it all day but got a patient up there. Had to stop—”
“Why, it’s—it’s late!” Lee looked dazed at the passage of time. “Your work, I didn’t mean to keep you from it—” and the boy leaped up.
“I like to talk about electricity. Come again and we’ll jaw some more.” Lanky, long John Akerly shook hands heartily.
Lee’s mind fairly seethed with the information it had tried to absorb about coils and codes and induction and what-not. Electricity was a language that Dr. William Pendexter spoke too, and the twenty miles back to King’s Cove fairly slid by.
As they drove up to the high sagging porch of the old Renaud place, the little grizzled Doctor started pulling a wooden box out of the back of his car. Lee put a willing shoulder to it, and involuntarily grunted a little. Just a little old box—but gosh, it was heavy!
“Not in here,” roared the Doctor, as Lee started to ease the thing down in his Great-uncle Gem’s room. “Go on upstairs.”
Breathing hard, Lee lugged it on, and following directions, slid it down in a corner of his workshop.
“That’s right! Good place for it. Some junk I’m going to leave with you,” rumbled Pendexter. “Get the lid off.”
The next moment Lee Renaud was on his knees beside the box, touching the contents as though they were gold and diamonds. A code book, some tattered pamphlets full of sketches and diagrams, and these well mixed in with coils of copper wire, screws, an old sounder still bearing its precious electromagnets, some scrap glass and brass. It might all have looked like trash to somebody else, but not to Lee Renaud.
Right here under his hand, experimental stuff such as he had never even hoped to buy! He touched one prize, then another.
“It’s too much! You don’t really mean to leave it?”
“Leaving it! By heck, of course I am. My wife would skin me alive if I brought that box back home to just sit and catch dust and spider webs again. Never fool with it any more, myself,—no time.”
“I—I—how will I ever thank you?” Lee couldn’t keep his hands from straying over the old sounder and the bits of real copper wire.
“Do something with it!” roared Pendexter, backing off testily from any further thanks. “Do something with it, that’s what!”