COMPRESSED 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.