The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service

E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

At Least Ten Thousand of Them, He Announced.
Copyright, 1918, by John C. Winston Company

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their——
It was that old practice sentence of typists, which is as old as are typewriting machines, and Joe Harned, seated before the told-style, noisy, but still capable machine in Philip Burton's telegraph office, had rattled it off twenty-five times and was on his twenty-sixth when suddenly, very suddenly, his mind began to work.
Or rather it might be said that an idea, the big idea , danced unceremoniously into his brain, and, beginning to take definite and concrete form, chased a score of other smaller ideas through all the thought-channels of his handsome, boyish, well-rounded head.
He came to a full stop and gazed steadily at the upturned paper in the typewriter in front of him. Twenty-fives times he had written that sentence, and twenty-five times with mechanical precision and true adherence to time-honored custom he had finished it by tapping off the word party.
It was a formula of words which some genius had devised for the fingering practice it gave one on the keyboard, and Joe Harned had written it hundreds of times before, just as thousands of others had done, without giving a thought to its meaning, or the significance that the substitution of a single word would give it.
He read it again, and as if it were the result of an uncontrollable impulse, his fingers began the rapid tap-tap-tap. And this time he substituted the new word that the big idea had suddenly thrust into his mind.
Joe gave the roller a twirl, the paper rolled out, dropped to the floor, and he grasped for it eagerly.