“Well, I want a man, and I want him quick. You’re—er—not very well fixed just now, are you?”
“I haven’t a penny!” cried the other, passionately, surrendering to some clutching tide of alcoholic recklessness.
“Well, my hours wouldn’t kill you!” began the older man, fraternally.
“I’m sick of the sight of a key and sounder!”
“You’d rather do the Edison act in a Third Avenue garret, I s’pose—broodin’ round inventin’ electrical gimcrackery nobody wants and nobody’s goin’ to buy!”
“But I tell you somebody will want what I’m going to do—and somebody is going to pay money for it, and a heap of money, too!”
“What’ve you got?” inquired the older man, with the slightest curl of the lip. The younger man seemed nettled by the touch of contempt in the other’s voice.
“I’ve got an amplifier and I’ve got a transmitting camera—you needn’t laugh, for when I get a relay so sensitive that I can sit in a St. Louis office and send a message to London or Paris, or when I can send a drawing of a train wreck somewhere outside of San Francisco right through to New York, or telegraph a photo or a map or a sketch—why, I’ve got something that men are going to pay for, and pay well!”
“I’ve heard of ’em all before—in the dope page o’ the Sunday papers!”
“But I tell you I’ve got this transmitting camera! All I want is time and money to work it out, on the business side. Wait a minute, now, and let me explain. If you’ve operated a key you’ll understand it easily enough. You know what we call the Tesla currents, and you know what selenium is. Well, when I first tackled this thing, my problem was to get some special apparatus for reproducing the shadows and high-lights on, say, a photograph. I had to have a different flow of current for light and dark, to carry the impression from the transmitter to the receiver. Well, I found that selenium did the trick, for a peculiarity of that mighty peculiar metal is that it offers less resistance to a current when in the light than in the dark. My next problem was to control the light in the receiving camera. That’s where the Tesla currents came in, inducing the rays of vacuum pipes under the high tension. Do you follow me?”