CHAPTER VIII
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 thewoods. That'll put us more'n a mile apart. This outfit worked all rightjust from room to room, but we're giving it a real try-out now." LeeRenaud's voice was full of suppressed excitement.
He wore a contraption, the like of which was never seen before. On hishead 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 hislips. 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 thatwhen its hand crank was turned at thirty-three revolutions per minute,its generators made thirty-three hundred revolutions per minute. InLee's pocket was folded a miniature aerial.
Lemuel Hicks wore a similar outfit.
Portable radio--that was something ambitious for a youngster to betackling!
But Lee Renaud had made many steps forward since that night when he hadput King's Cove in touch with the world with his homemade radio. TheCove itself had stepped out a bit in the last months. It had become aplace of sharpest contrasts. Though mule and ox carts still creaked downits sandy village road, within its cabins nightly sounded the tinkle ofmusic which radio, that modern of the moderns, plucked from the air ofthe great outside world. The radios were homebuilt affairs, some thegalena crystal type, some the carborundum type, all patterned afterLee's first attempt--but they got the music, the news, and the latestcrop prices. They were waking up the Cove out of its long lethargy.
Over in Tilton, Dr. Pendexter had told a newspaperman of the struggle alone boy was making to master electricity, and had laughed about thewhimsy of radio in that backwash, the Cove.
The reporter knew a good story when he heard one, and wrote up Radio andthe Cove--with a strange outcome for Lee Renaud.
That newspaper story was good human-interest news. It was copied byother papers and was read by a far-reaching audience. Then things beganto happen.
Touched by the pathos of a boy's lonely struggle, radio fans here, thereand elsewhere packed boxes of material and sent them down to Renaud ofthe Cove. Americans are generous when human interest hits the heart.Books, wires, tubes--Lee Renaud was almost swamped in the wealth ofexperimental material. And Lee even had a visit from one of the regularrelay station inspectors. There was talk of making the Cove a step inthe Relay Organization of America and erecting a sending station there.The talk died down, but out of the affair Lee got in touch with AmericanRadio 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 ofelectricity 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 beganhis work back at the very beginning. Up in his workshop stood copies ofsome of the very first radio models. There was a primitive looking HertzResonator, or Receiver. It was nothing but a hoop of wire, its circlebeing broken at one point by a pair of tiny brass balls, with a verysmall air-gap between. When this resonator was set up across a room,exactly opposite the spark-gap of an electric oscillator, and the key ofthe oscillator was manipulated, sparks shot across the gap in the wirehoop, even though the hoop was not attached to a current. And that waswireless--the first one! In Lee's collection were also copies of theBranly Coherer and the Morse Inker, and of that amazingly simple radioapparatus 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 hadseen 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 ontheir backs. There was power in them, but of necessity they were crudelybuilt.
And now would this simple mechanism transmit sound for more than the fewyards for which it had been tested thus far? Time and again as hetramped along, Lee was tempted to halt, set up his outfit, and seekconnection with Hicks, waiting at the village.
But he had set the forks of the road as his distance, and Lem wouldn'tbe expecting him before a certain time anyway.
At last he was there, where the rambling country road divided, onebranch dropping down into the valley, the other leading over a woodedridge. It was all a matter of minutes for young Renaud to assemble hisoutfit, erect the folding aerial above his head, adjust the mouthpiece,and crank the handshaft for power. He was in a tremble as he pressed thebuzzer signal and tensely waited for some sign that the sound had gonethrough.
But no reply came in through the small ear phone receivers. The wholeworld seemed suddenly still, save for the faint rustle of wind in theleaves, the twit-twit of a bird off in the woods.
"Guess it won't work. It's failed!" Lee's mind was registering dullywhen, with a hissing "zip" that made him leap clear of the ground, adistinct buzz sounded in the ear pieces.
"H-hello! You--you hear me? You Lem!" Lee shrieked into the littletransmitter.
"Hey! Plain as day! You like to blew my head off!" came the delightedvoice of Lem Hicks. "Whoop-la, you done made something, Lee Renaud!"
For a spell the two boys passed excited words back and forth throughthis thing that had made a mile of space as nothing. Then a sudden beatof hoofs down the woods road made Lee leap back towards the ditch. Hehad hardly cleared the way when a lank bay horse, lathered in mud andsweat, 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 torein in his animal. "What for be you rigged up to scare honest folk outof the road?"
"I--just trying an experiment," Lee hastily slipped his head free ofaerial harness and the mouth and ear pieces, so that he looked humanonce more.
"No time for any of your 'speriments to be hindering me," called therider over his shoulder, as his horse plunged on down the road. "I'mspreading 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 Covevillage some ten minutes later and found that his news had preceded him.
Two little portable radio machines, manipulated by a couple ofyoungsters, had brought the word faster, ten times faster, than hishorse could travel and men were already preparing to set out to rescuethe flood sufferers.