The doctor’s eyes twinkled.
“Very few of us are in danger of dying from overwork, I imagine,” he said. “But I’ve known you chaps to work mighty hard at radio.”
“That isn’t work!” exclaimed Joe. “That’s fun.”
“Sure thing,” echoed Herb.
“I’ll tell the world it is,” added Jimmy.
“We can’t wait for a chance to get at it,” affirmed Bob.
“Seems to be unanimous,” laughed the doctor. “I feel the same way myself. I never get tired of it, and I suppose the reason is that something new is turning up all the time. One magical thing treads close on the heels of another so that there’s no such thing as monotony. There isn’t a week that passes, scarcely a day in fact, that something doesn’t spring up that makes you gasp with astonishment. Your mind is kept on the alert all the time, and that’s one thing among many others that makes the charm of radio.”
“I see that they’re using it everywhere in the Government departments,” remarked Bob.
“Every single one of them,” replied the doctor. The President himself has had a set installed and uses it constantly. The head of the army talks over it to every fort and garrison and camp in the United States. The Secretary of the Navy communicates by it with every ship and naval station in the Atlantic and Pacific as far away as Honolulu and the Philippines. The Secretary of Agriculture sends out information broadcast to every farmer in the United States who happens to have a radio receiving set. And so with every other branch of the Government.
“That reminds me,” he went on, warming to his subject, as he always did when he got on his favorite theme, “of a talk I had the other day on the train with a man in the Government Air Mail Service. He was a man, too, who knew what he was talking about, for he was the first man to fly the mail successfully both ways between New York and Washington on the initial air mail run.