Umph, well, those old fellows in the past had gone right ahead and used such things as came to hand—and he was going to do the same thing.
Lee studied the chapter on electricity in “Ye Compleat Knowledge of Philosophy and Sciences” until he could almost say it by heart. Jar of fair glass, brass rod “compleated” with a knob, wooden stopper, sheets of substance tinfoil, chain of brass, three coiled springs—these were the things Lee needed to make the Leyden Jar, which was to be his first forward step in electricity.
Desperately he ransacked the place for “laboratory material” and finally gathered together an old metal door knob, an empty fruit jar, a few links of small chain, some tin cans and bits of wire. It didn’t look very scientific—that pile of junk!
But Lee Renaud set his jaw doggedly, and got down to work. Since he had no “substance tinfoil,” he figured that perhaps pieces of tin from old tin cans might do. So he slit down a can, and cut it nearly all the way off from its bottom. The round bottom he patiently trimmed till it would just slip in through the neck of the jar. By rolling the tin sides smaller, he managed to push the whole affair down into the jar, where the released roll of the tin sprung itself out to fit neatly against the inside surface of the glass. Then the outside had to be “tinned” and Lee kept trying until he found a can that was a good tight fit when the jar was pushed down into it.
And there, he had made a start! Instead of tinfoil, the jar was at least covered in tin in the prescribed manner two-thirds of the way up, inside and outside.
Instead of “ye brass rod” that the old book called for, he used a length of wire which he “compleated” with the old brass door knob. He thrust this wire through a wooden stopper he had whittled to fit the mouth of the jar. He had no metal springs, but decided to make the contact with the bit of chain fastened to the end of the wire. When this was thrust down into the jar, the little chain rested on the tin bottom, which was still in part connected with the tin side lining.
Lee Renaud had worked terrifically hard at his job, but now that he stood back to inspect the finished product, it looked more like junk than ever. It didn’t seem humanly possible that such a thing could be an adjunct to collecting power, to storing the marvel of electricity.
Half-heartedly Lee held the knob of the jar to the metal points set against the crystal “friction maker.” After a few minutes of this, he grasped the jar in his left hand and experimentally approached his right thumb towards the knob.
There came a scream and a rattle of glass and tin as the jar was flung from Lee’s hand to smash into a hundred bits on the floor. The boy leaped high in the air and came down, apparently trying to rub himself in six places at the same time.