“The mysteries of these mystifiers were mystical enough to mystify the most mysterious and I saw everything from the wonderful East Indian rope trick to the equally wonderful spirit rapping table. David Devant, the celebrated conjurer, exhibited the table and he said—and nobody in the audience disputed him—that the table possessed the ghostly property of connecting this world with the next, the quick with the dead, that which is now with that which is to be, and that it would rap out answers to any questions which might be asked to prove it.
“Some of the wiseacres present laughed lightly at the conjurer’s immaterial remarks but he assured them on his honor as a gentleman its guiding spirit was no lesser an (astral) light than that of old King Solomon himself. Thereupon Mr. Devant invited the audience to ply the immortal part of the departed wise man with any questions that might be fit and proper.
“Strangely enough while nobody believed in spirit communications as exemplified by the rapping table everybody was most anxious to ask some question which no one on this side of the borderland could answer. The replies that King Solomon rapped out were deep and philosophical although not always conforming to our ideas of ethics and morals. Indeed, his very first reply to a question, which was put by some guileless suffragette, nearly broke up the show. She asked him, as Bill Adams would say ‘as man to man,’ how many wives a man should have, and in that she thought she had trapped him even though he was beyond the pale of the law. But Solomon showed his superior wisdom as usual and rebuked the lady by rapping furiously on the table until he had nearly eight hundred wives to his credit.
“To convince the audience that the table was just a common, single legged, three footed one of the milliner’s variety the conjurer invited a committee to step up on the stage and examine it; I went up with several other men and we nearly had a private séance with old Sol. We examined the table and found it O. K.; to me it seemed a little top heavy but I made due allowance for this because King Solomon was a brainy man.
“Now when the conjurer held it at arm’s length, or I did so as one of the committee, it kept right on rapping out replies from the gone but not forgotten spirit of the ancient King. Even when the table was passed through the audience—”
“You mean among the audience, don’t you, Jack? Even a spirit table would have hard work passing through the audience.”
“I stand corrected. Even when the table was passed among the audience it kept up its dark rappings to the great enjoyment of the audience. To me the rappings had a more or less mechanical sound as if King Solomon’s knuckles had turned to spirit gold, or common brass would do.
“I figured it out that the raps were done wirelessly, by which I mean that the top of the table was hollow and contained a small but sensitive receiver with a single stroke tapper and as the top of the table was made of a sheet of burnished copper and the three footed base was of iron with the connecting leg between them of wood it seemed reasonable to suppose that these formed the aerial and ground.
“Although I listened hard I couldn’t hear the faintest sound of a spark-gap working but it is an easy matter to put the transmitter in a sound-proof booth.”
“And thus doth a little science make big skeptics of us all. Now tell our young readers, Jack, how S O S came to take the place of C Q D, as the ambulance call of the sea.”