“And electricity, there’s plenty about that too, isn’t there?” Lee Renaud couldn’t help but break in.
“Yes, yes,” Gem Renaud agreed with him absently, and went on flipping through the pages. “How natural they all look, the old illustrations, the waterwheel, undershot and overshot, the waterchain, the turbine engine! It seems just yesterday that Master Lloyd, the Welshman, had us boys all down at the creek building these mechanisms out of canes and what-not, building them so as they’d really work, to prove to him that we understood what he was trying to teach us.”
“And did you build electrical things too?”
“Why, yes. Master Lloyd sent all the way back to New York to get the proper materials for us.”
Materials from New York! Lee turned away in disappointment. He had been hoping to experiment some with electricity himself, but what had he out here to work with?
Later in the day Lee picked up the old book again and plunged into its strange, stilted dissertation on electricity. He learned that away back in 1745, von Kleist, a priest in Pomerania, had experimented with a glass jar half full of water, corked, and a long nail driven through the cork to reach down into the water. When the old Pomeranian priest touched this nail head to a frictional machine, he got a “shock” that made him think the jar was full of devils. And that ended experimentation for him. But the next year two Hollanders, professors at Leyden University, carried von Kleist’s experiment forward till they developed the Leyden Jar, a practical method for storing electricity.
To Lee Renaud, stumbling upon all this old knowledge, it seemed that he himself was just discovering electricity. For most of the fifteen years of his life, he had merely accepted electricity as an ordinary, everyday thing. Now the real glory of it smote him, thrilled him, inspired him. He longed desperately to try out these primitive experiments for himself. Here on these pages was given the beginning of man’s knowledge of electricity, the beginning of man’s struggle to harness this mighty power into usefulness.
If only he could “grow up” with this marvelous power, understand it, step by step! A large order, indeed! Especially for a youngster stuck off in the backwoods.
But anyway, Lee Renaud flung young enthusiasm and will power into this strange task he was setting for himself.
Already he had the crystal wheel that could make a spark, that could generate electricity. But unless that electricity could be “stored,” it had no usefulness. So it was up to him to make an electrical condenser. But of what?