TAPS
"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!"