surprised. Upon a small table were various instruments and devices and a seeming tangle of wires, while, tucked away on a bookshelf, was the little crystal set which had so recently been Tom’s pride and joy.
And still greater was their surprise when, after busying himself over the instruments, the faint sounds of music filled the room, coming mysteriously from the apparent odds and ends upon the table.
“It’s all homemade,” Tom had explained proudly. “But it works. Frank and I rigged it up just as an experiment. Now I’m going to reassemble it and put it in a case and have a regular set.”
“Wait a minute, Tom,” his father had interrupted. “You’ll have to explain a bit. If that lot of stuff can give so much better results than the set you bought, why didn’t you make it in the first place, and what’s the difference anyway?”
“Well, you see, Dad,” Tom tried to explain, “I had to start at the bottom as you said and a crystal set’s the bottom. This is a vacuum tube set. Those things like little electric lights are the tubes
and they’re the heart of the whole thing, and I’ve a one-step amplifier and that has to have another tube. I didn’t have enough pocket money to buy everything so Frank lent me some of his. You see it’s this way——”
“Never mind about the technicalities,” laughed his father. “As I said before, go to it. Get what you need and keep busy. It’s a fine thing for you boys. Now turn her on again, or whatever you call it, and let’s hear some more music.”
From that time, Tom’s progress was rapid although, as his father had jokingly remarked, the boy’s chief occupation appeared to be building sets one day only to tear them down and reconstruct them the next.
Tom’s room had assumed the appearance of an electrical supply shop. Tools, wire, sheet brass, bakelite, hard rubber knobs, odds and ends of metal, coils and countless other things had taken the places of books, skates, baseball bats and papers, and the fiction magazines had given way to radio periodicals, blue prints and diagrams. Mrs. Pauling was in despair and complained to her husband that Tom was making a dreadful mess
of his room and expressed fears that he might get hurt fooling with electricity.