He put down the cap, and looked towards his audience. Not a single person moved in the very least. The distinguished party, tier upon tier, might have been a group of wooden statues painted and coloured to resemble the human form. Sir William moved on.
"Here," he said, "is a piece of apparatus enclosed in this box, which presented the first great difficulty in the course of the twenty years during which I have been engaged upon this work. Within this wooden shell," he tapped it with his fingers, "the thought vibrations, if I may call them so, are collected and transformed into definite and separate electric currents. Every single variation in their strength or quality is changed into a corresponding electric current, which, in its turn, varies from its fellow currents. So far, I have found that from between 3,000 to 4,000 different currents, differing in their tensity and their power, are generated by the ordinary thoughts of the ordinary human being.
"You may take it from me, as I shall presently show my scientific brethren, that within this box Thought Vibrations are transformed into electric currents."
He passed on to a much larger machine, which was connected by a network of wires covered with crimson and yellow silk, to the mahogany box which he had just left.
The outside of the new piece of apparatus resembled nothing so much as one of those enormous wine-coolers which one sees in big restaurants or hotels. It was a large square case standing upon four legs. But from the lid of this case rose something which suggested a very large photographic camera, but made of dull steel. The tube, in which the lens of an ordinary camera is set, was in this case prolonged for six or seven feet, and was lost in the interior of the next machine.
And now, for the first time, the strained ears of the spectators caught a note of keen vibration and excitement in Sir William Gouldesbrough's voice. He had been speaking very quietly and confidently hitherto; but now the measured utterance rose half a tone; and, as when some great actor draws near in speech to the climax of the event he mimics, so Sir William also began to be agitated, and so also the change in tone sent a thrill and quiver through the ranks of those who sat before him.
"Here," he said, "I have succeeded in transforming my electric currents into light. That is nothing, you may think for a moment, the electric current produces light in your own houses at any moment; but you must remember that in your incandescent bulbs the light is always the same in its quality. Light of this sort, passed through the prism of a spectroscope will always tell the same story when the screen presents itself for analysis. My problem has been to produce an infinite variety of light, so that every single thought vibration will produce, when transformed, its own special and individual quality of light, and that," he concluded, "I have done."
Sir Harold Oliver, who had been leaning forward with grey eyes so strained and intent that all the life seemed to have gone out of them and they resembled sick pearls, gave a gasp as Sir William paused.
Then Gouldesbrough continued.
He placed his hand upon the thing like a camera which rose from the lid of the larger structure below it.