STRANGE 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, not THE 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.