"I guess our folks won't kick," Bob conjectured confidently. "I notice that they're getting almost as much interested in the game as we are. Besides we won't have to stay in the city over night. The show's in the afternoon as well as the evening and we can be home before ten o'clock."
"We'll put it up to them anyway," replied Joe. They did "put it up" to their parents with such effect that their consent was readily obtained, though strict promises were exacted that they would spend only the afternoon in the city and take the early evening train for home.
It was a hilarious group that made their way to the city the next day, full of eager expectations of the wonders to be seen, expectations that were realized to the full.
From the moment the boys crowded into the jammed elevators and were shot to the enclosed roof in which the exhibition was held they enjoyed one continuous round of pleasure and excitement. The place was thronged, and, as a matter of fact, many late comers were turned away for lack of room. But the boys wound in and out like eels, and there were very few things worth seeing that eluded their eager eyes. Impressions crowded in upon them so thick and fast that it was not until later that they were fully able to appreciate the wonders that were being displayed for their benefit.
They listened to talks from men skilled in radio work, they wandered about to the many booths where information was given about everything connected with wireless, they studied various types of coils, transformers, vacuum tubes, switches, aerials, terminals, everything in fact that ambitious young amateurs could wish to know.
There was the identical apparatus with its marvelously sensitive receiver, which, while installed in Scotland, had correctly registered signals from an amateur radio station in America.
A little later they stood entranced in the Convention Hall before a new, beautifully modeled radio amplifier, so massive that the volume of music it poured forth actually seemed to cause vibration in the walls of the great room in which they stood.
One of the most interesting features was the radio-controlled automobile. The crowd before this almost incredible invention was so dense that the operator was handicapped in his demonstration.
The car was about seven feet in length, with a cylindrical mass of wire rising about six feet above its body. It was upon this that the swiftly moving car caught signals from antennae stretched across the hall. The boys watched, fascinated, as the inventor, opening and closing the switches in its mechanism by use of a radio wave of one hundred and thirty-five metres in length, caused the small car to back out of its garage and run about the hall without a driver, delivering papers and messages, afterward returning to the garage.
Then they saw the transmitters that could shoot radio messages into space, and hung entranced over the moving pictures of what happens in a vacuum tube. Nothing escaped them, and they "did" the show thoroughly, so thoroughly in fact that at the end they were, as Joe expressed it, "all in."