"Not so far," she laughed. "All we've gotten is smelly, sticky messes.
The structure we're after just doesn't want to form. We're trying
different catalysts now, but it's mostly cut and try; neither of us is
enough of a chemist to predict what'll work."
"Come along and see," offered Arch.
They went through the garden and into the long one-room building
beyond. Culquhoun looked at the instruments with a certain wistfulness;
he had trouble getting money to keep up any kind of lab. But the
heart of the place was merely a second-hand gas stove, converted by
haywiring into an air-tight, closely regulated oven. It was hot in the
room. Elizabeth pointed to a stack of molds covered with a pitchy tar.
"Our failures," she said. "Maybe we could patent the formula for glue.
It certainly sticks tightly enough."
Arch checked the gauges. "Got a while to go yet," he said. "The
catalyst this time is powdered ferric oxide--plain rust to you. The
materials include aluminum oxide, synthetic rubber, and some barium and
titanium compounds. I must admit that part of it is cheap."
They wandered back toward the house. "What'll you do with the material
if it does come out?" asked Culquhoun.
"Oh--it'd make damn good condensers," said Arch. "Insulation, too.
There ought to be a lot of money in it. Really, though, the theory
interests me more. Care to see it?"
Culquhoun nodded, and Arch pawed through the papers on his desk. The
top was littered with his stamp collection, but an unerring instinct
seemed to guide his hand to the desired papers. He handed over an
untidy manuscript consisting chiefly of mathematical symbols. "But
don't bother with it now," he said. "I blew us to a new Bach the other
day--St. Matthew Passion."
Culquhoun's eyes lit up, and for a while the house was filled with a
serene strength which this century had forgotten. "Mon, mon," whispered
the professor at last. "What he could have done with the bagpipes!"
"Barbarian," said Elizabeth.
* * * * *
As it happened, that one test batch was successful. Arch took a slab of
darkly shining material from the lab oven and sawed it up for tests.
It met them all. Heat and cold had little effect, even on the electric
properties. Ordinary chemicals did not react. The dielectric constant
was over a million, and the charge was held without appreciable leakage.
"Why doesn't it arc over?" wondered Elizabeth.
"Electric field's entirely inside the slab," said Arch absently. "You
need a solid conductor, like a wire, between the poles to discharge it.
The breakdown voltage is so high that you might as well forget about
it." He lifted a piece about ten inches square and two inches thick.
"You could charge this hunk up with enough juice to run our house for
a couple of years, I imagine; of course, it'd be D.C., so you'd have
to drain it through a small A.C. generator. The material itself costs,
oh, I'd guess fifty cents, a dollar maybe if you include labor." He
hesitated. "You know, it occurs to me we've just killed the wet-cell
battery."
"Good riddance," said Elizabeth. "The first thing you do, my boy, is
make a replacement for that so-called battery in our car. I'm tired of
having the clunk die in the middle of traffic."
"Okay," said Arch mildly. "Then we see about patents. But--honey, don't
you think this deserves a small celebration of sorts?"
Arch spent a few days drawing up specifications and methods of
manufacture. By giving the subject a little thought, he discovered that
production could be fantastically cheap and easy. If you knew just what
was needed, you had only to mix together a few chemicals obtainable in
any drugstore, bake them in your oven for several hours, and saw the
resulting chunk into pieces of suitable size. By adding resistances and
inductances, which could be made if necessary from junkyard wire, you
could bleed off the charge at any desired rate.
* * * * *
Culquhoun's oldest son Robert dropped over to find Arch tinkering with
his rickety '48 Chevrolet. "Dad says you've got a new kind of battery,"
he remarked.
"Uh.... Yes. I'll make him one if he wants. All we'll need to charge it
is a rectifier and a volt-meter. Need a regulator for the discharge, of
course." Arch lifted out his old battery and laid it on the grass.
"I've got a better idea, sir," said the boy. "I'd like to buy a _big_
piece of the stuff from you."
"Whatever for?" asked Arch.
"Run my hot rod off it," said Bob from the lofty eminence of sixteen
years. "Shouldn't be too hard, should it? Rip out the engine; use the
big condenser to turn a D.C. motor--it'd be a lot cheaper than gas, and
no plugged fuel lines either."
"You know," said Arch, "I never thought of that."
He lifted the ridiculously small object which was his new current
source and placed it inside the hood. He had had to add two pieces of
strap iron to hold it in position. "Why a regular motor?" he mused. "If
you have D.C. coming out at a controlled rate, you could use it to turn
your main drive shaft by a very simple and cheap arrangement."
"Oh, sure," said Robert scornfully. "That's what I meant. Any backyard
mechanic could fix that up--if he didn't electrocute himself first. But
how about it, Dr. Arch? How much would you want for a piece like that?"
"I haven't the time," said the physicist. "Tell you what, though, I'll
give you a copy of the specs and you can make your own. There's nothing
to it, if your mother will let you have the oven for a day. Cost you
maybe five dollars for materials."
"Sell it for twenty-five," said Bob dreamily. "Look, Dr. Arch, would
you like to go into business with me? I'll pay you whatever royalty
seems right."
"I'm going to Boston with just that in mind," said Arch, fumbling with
the cables. "However, go ahead. Consider yourself a licensee. I want
ten percent of the selling price, and I'll trust a Scotch Yankee like
you to make me a million."
He had no business sense. It would have saved him much grief if he had.
* * * * *
The countryside looked clean, full of hope and springtime. Now and
then a chrome-plated monster of an automobile whipped past Arch's
sedately chugging antique. He observed them with a certain contempt, an
engineer's eye for the Goldbergian inefficiency of a mechanism which
turned this rod to push that cam to rotate such and such a gear, and
needed a cooling system to throw away most of the energy generated. Bob
Culquhoun, he reflected, had a saner outlook. Not only was electricity
cheaper in the first place, but the wasted power would be minimal and
the "prime mover"--the capacitor itself--simply would not wear out.
Automobiles could be sold for perhaps five hundred dollars and built to
last, not to run up repair bills till the owner was driven to buying
a new model. The world's waning resources of petroleum could go into
something useful: generating power at central stations, forming a base
for organic syntheses; they would stretch out for centuries more. Coal
could really come back into its own.
Hm ... wait. There was no reason why you couldn't power every type of
vehicle with capacitors. Aircraft could stay aloft a month at a time if
desired--a year if nothing wore out; ships could be five years at sea.
You wouldn't need those thousands of miles of power line littering the
countryside and wasting the energy they carried; you could charge small
capacitors for home use right at the station and deliver them to the
consumer's doorstep at a fraction of the present cost.
Come to think of it, there was a lot of remote power, in waterfalls for
instance, unused now because the distance over which lines would have
to be strung was too great. Not any longer! And the sunlight pouring
from this cloudless sky--to dilute to run a machine of any size. But
you could focus a lot of it on a generator whose output voltage was
jacked up, and charge capacitors with thousands of kilowatt-hours
each. Generators everywhere could be made a lot smaller, because they
wouldn't have to handle peak loads but only meet average demand.
_This thing is bigger than I realized_, he thought with a tingle of
excitement. _My God, in a year I may be a millionaire!_
He got into Boston, only losing his way twice, which is a good record
for anyone, and found the office of Addison, his patent attorney. It
didn't take him long to be admitted.
The dusty little man riffled through the pages. "It looks all right,"
he said unemotionally. Nothing ever seemed to excite him. "For a
change, this seems to be something which can be patented, even under
our ridiculous laws. Not the law of nature you've discovered, of
course, but the process--" He peered up, sharply. "Is there any
alternative process?"
"Not that I know of," said Arch. "On the basis of theory, I'm inclined
to doubt it."
"Very well, very well. I'll see about putting it through. Hm--you say
it's quite simple and cheap? Better keep your mouth shut for a while,
till the application has been approved. Otherwise everybody will
start making it, and you'll have a devil of a time collecting your
royalties. A patent is only a license to sue, you know, and you can't
sue fifty million bathtub chemists."
"Oh," said Arch, taken aback. "I--well, I've told some of my neighbors,
of course. One of the local teen-agers is going to make a car powered
by--"