The Radio Planet

Ralph Milne Farley
ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
THE RADIO PLANET Originally published in 1926 as a serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly .
Cover by John Schoenherr. Illustration by Jack Gaughan.
Ralph Milne Farley is also the author of The Radio Beasts available now from Ace Books (F-304)
Printed in U. S. A.
Could you make a radio set? Don’t answer rashly. Don’t say that you have already built several. For note that we did not ask whether you could assemble a set from parts already manufactured by others, but rather whether you could build the entire set yourself—from the ground up. That means making every part you require, including the vacuum tubes, the acid in the batteries, the wires, the insulation.
If you think that you could do this, let us ask you one further question. Put yourself in the place of the hero of the following story, and imagine yourself stranded amid intelligent savages who have not progressed beyond the wood age. Under such circumstances, with nothing to guide you but your scientific memory, with no tools except those of your own creation, and with no materials save those furnished by nature, could you, though the lives and happiness of your dear ones depended upon it—could you make a radio set?
— R. M. F. , 1926.
“It’s too bad that Myles Cabot can’t see this!” I exclaimed, as my eye fell on the following item:
SIGNALS FROM MARS FAIL TO REACH HARVARD Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wednesday. The Harvard College Radio Station has for several weeks been in receipt of fragmentary signals of extraordinarily long wave-length, Professor Hammond announced yesterday. So far as it has been possible to test the direction of the source of these waves, it appears that the direction has a twenty-four hour cycle, thus indicating that the origin of these waves is some point outside the earth. The university authorities will express no opinion as to whether or not these messages come from Mars.