It most certainly did amount to something. When he got off to himself, Lee’s hands trembled so that he could hardly tear the wrappings away. Ah, there it was—a big, fat, red-bound volume, with gold letters, “The Amateur Electrician’s Handbook.”
There was information enough within those red covers to set Lee Renaud off on a brand new set of experiments. From a battery made of a trio of glass jars containing salt water, each jar holding its strips of zinc and copper, and fitted with wiring, he charged a bar of soft iron until it was magnetized—but this would stay magnetized only so long as the current was put to it. Then he electrified a bit of steel—and it became a permanent magnet.
Lee became more ambitious in his experimenting. He was after power, something that would generate real movement. And so he rushed in where a more experienced hand might have been stalled by the lack of material. But Lee Renaud staunchly refused to be stalled, even though his supply of working material was nothing much beyond bits of tin, iron, some barbed wire, old nails, broken glass, and pieces of brass salvaged from old cartridges.
And out of such junk, Lee proposed to make himself an electric motor!
Well, that was the next step for him. If he were going forward, he just had to make a motor.
His first attempt was the simplest of the simple. According to directions and diagrams in the new red book, he took current from his Voltaic Cell and put it in a circuit through a loop of wire which lay in a strongly magnetized field. The push of power in the lines of magnetic force, through changes in the connections, set the loop to revolving. And there it was, his electric motor! Very sketchy, very rudimentary indeed, but it worked in its own crude way.
Later, and after much study, he decided to attempt a real little dynamo. This, by comparison with number one, was to be an elaborate affair, comprising a loop of wire revolving between the poles of a horseshoe-shaped permanent magnet, with two half-cylinders connected to the revolving loop of wire and touched at each half-turn by stationary metal brushes. The metal brushing was to turn the alternating current into a direct current. In the making, Lee ran into all sorts of troubles, mostly due to his poor materials. But he kept on, and at last produced something that sputtered and coughed and was as cranky as a one-eyed mule. But it ran part of the time—enough to teach Lee more about electric motors than all the reading in the world could have done.
A few weeks later, Dr. William Pendexter drove his prim little car out again to see how Gem Renaud’s leg was progressing—which really wasn’t necessary for old Mr. Renaud was coming on finely. He might just as well have admitted that the real reason for driving twenty miles to King’s Cove was to see how Lee and electricity were hitting it off.
The wiry little man roamed all over the Renaud place and roared his approval of Lee’s cranky, balky dynamo. When he was climbing into his car, he called, “Hi there, Lee! I’ve got to go to Tilton and back to bring something I want for Gem. Want to go for the ride?”
To Lee, who for months now had been stuck away down in the backwoods Cove, this trip to town seemed to be bringing him into another world, the progressive world that he had slipped out of for a spell. Drug stores, banks, cars, tall poles for telegraph and telephone wires, electric lights—seeing all these again made his dabblings at Voltaic Cells and the crystal wheel seem truly to belong to a long-gone, primitive period.