But Lee Renaud had made many steps forward since that night when he had put King’s Cove in touch with the world with his homemade radio. The Cove itself had stepped out a bit in the last months. It had become a place of sharpest contrasts. Though mule and ox carts still creaked down its sandy village road, within its cabins nightly sounded the tinkle of music which radio, that modern of the moderns, plucked from the air of the great outside world. The radios were homebuilt affairs, some the galena crystal type, some the carborundum type, all patterned after Lee’s first attempt—but they got the music, the news, and the latest crop prices. They were waking up the Cove out of its long lethargy.
Over in Tilton, Dr. Pendexter had told a newspaperman of the struggle a lone boy was making to master electricity, and had laughed about the whimsy of radio in that backwash, the Cove.
The reporter knew a good story when he heard one, and wrote up Radio and the Cove—with a strange outcome for Lee Renaud.
That newspaper story was good human-interest news. It was copied by other papers and was read by a far-reaching audience. Then things began to happen.
Touched by the pathos of a boy’s lonely struggle, radio fans here, there and elsewhere packed boxes of material and sent them down to Renaud of the Cove. Americans are generous when human interest hits the heart. Books, wires, tubes—Lee Renaud was almost swamped in the wealth of experimental material. And Lee even had a visit from one of the regular relay station inspectors. There was talk of making the Cove a step in the Relay Organization of America and erecting a sending station there. The talk died down, but out of the affair Lee got in touch with American Radio Relay and was given a call number, “RL.”
With the thoroughness peculiar to him, Lee made no spectacular plunge, but went ahead step by step. As he had followed the beginnings of electricity up through that ancient scientific book, so he now tried to “grow up” along with the moderns, in radio.
The making of a new type radio transmitter was his dream, but he began his work back at the very beginning. Up in his workshop stood copies of some of the very first radio models. There was a primitive looking Hertz Resonator, or Receiver. It was nothing but a hoop of wire, its circle being broken at one point by a pair of tiny brass balls, with a very small air-gap between. When this resonator was set up across a room, exactly opposite the spark-gap of an electric oscillator, and the key of the oscillator was manipulated, sparks shot across the gap in the wire hoop, even though the hoop was not attached to a current. And that was wireless—the first one! In Lee’s collection were also copies of the Branly Coherer and the Morse Inker, and of that amazingly simple radio apparatus with which the inventor Marconi shook the world.
As Marconi had built on the discoveries of Hertz and Lodge and Branly, so Renaud planned to build on Marconi. Where other modern inventors had seen the vision of huge transmitting machines and tremendous power, young Renaud’s vision was to ensmall radio.
Months of work had gone into these outfits that he and Lem Hicks bore on their backs. There was power in them, but of necessity they were crudely built.
And now would this simple mechanism transmit sound for more than the few yards for which it had been tested thus far? Time and again as he tramped along, Lee was tempted to halt, set up his outfit, and seek connection with Hicks, waiting at the village.