Powers of Invisibility
"I apologize for keeping you waiting, gentlemen," he told them, "but you will appreciate that a demonstration of my discovery at this stage is somewhat difficult. However, Gray and I think we can give you an idea, at least, of the thing."
"You mean you're going to make some matter invisible before us?" Carton asked incredulously, and as the scientist turned toward him, added quickly, "I'm Carton—of the Inquirer."
Dr. Grantham bowed. "Yes," he said quietly, "we think we can give you a demonstration of it on a small scale. Will you step this way, gentlemen?"
As Carton passed after the physicist with his two companions into the room beyond, he felt his skepticism fading still farther. It was apparently Dr. Grantham's private laboratory into which they were ushered. Beside a table in it there awaited them a dark young man of thirty or so, with quick black probing eyes. When introduced to the reporters as Gray, Dr. Grantham's assistant, he gave them but a curt nod.
The room seemed full of physical apparatus for the most part of outlandish appearance to Carton, he and his two fellow-journalists looking alertly around them. Upon the table before them, just inside the casement through which the brilliant sunlight was streaming, rested a squat cabinet of black metal, but inches square, with a small metal framework on it and with connections to what seemed small batteries and a row of three switches.
Dr. Grantham was drawing their attention to this when the door behind them opened and another entered, an impeccably-dressed older man whose white head and genial countenance the reporters recognized instantly as that of Dr. Calvin Ellsworth, America University's very prominent president. He waved Grantham back as the latter turned toward him.
"Don't let me interrupt, Grantham," he adjured him. "I just wanted to be a spectator like the rest."
Dr. Grantham nodded in understanding, and turned back to the reporters.
"To describe understandingly what I am going to show you," he told them, "you must understand something of the principle involved in this. I can make invisible, and that may seem a strange thing to many, who have not ever stopped to wonder just why matter is visible at all."