CHAPTER X
A LESSON IN DIPLOMACY
A few minutes later the purser stepped quietly into the wireless house. Roy sat before his operating table, his head bowed on his extended arms.
“Cheer up!” called the purser. “This won’t do at all. Tell me what has happened.”
Roy recounted the entire incident. As the recital continued, the purser’s face became as sober as Roy’s had been.
“I don’t know a thing about electricity,” he commented, when Roy had concluded his brief description of what had occurred. “Are you very sure that you are correct?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Robbins. You see, the belt on the donkey-engine was slipping. I noticed that at the start. The slipping of the belt produced undue friction and that, in turn, developed frictional or static electricity. The more the belt slipped, the more it became charged with electricity. Finally the belt became so highly charged that the electricity jumped to the swaying end of the broken bale strap. This bale strap was broken into two pieces. The end swaying caught the charge as it leaped from the belt and a second spark occurred when the charge leaped the other gap in the strap. This last part of the strap was grounded by the chain that ran down to the metal frame of the ship. So there was a perfect mechanism for making and discharging electricity. As long as the belt continued to slip, electricity would have been generated. And every time the current was discharged, there would have been a spark right in that loose cotton where the bale was broken open.”
“I don’t know a thing about electricity, as I told you. But if you say it was so, I have no doubt it was.”
“It’s just like electricity in the skies,” explained Roy. “You have often seen lightning, Mr. Robbins. Lightning is only electricity leaping from a cloud to the earth or to another cloud. We usually have lightning in hot weather. Then the heated air from the earth rushes upward with such velocity that it generates electricity, charging the clouds with it, just as that whirling belt was charged by the friction of the wheel. That electricity has to reach the earth. When the potential is high enough, the current leaps from the cloud to the earth and a spark occurs which we call lightning. Sparks are made only when an electric current is interrupted in its flow and has to jump a gap. Electricity is flowing through a telegraph-wire all the time, but there is no spark because there is no break in the wire. But if the wire should be cut and the ends held near together, the current would jump the gap, making a spark as it leaped. That’s the thing that makes it possible to have automobiles. Electric currents run from the magneto, which generates them, to the spark-plugs in the cylinders. There the currents have to leap tiny gaps and sparks result, which explode the gasoline vapor. There are several ways to generate electricity, but the current, once generated, always follows the same laws. Yet I couldn’t make the captain understand. In fact he wouldn’t give me an opportunity to explain. I tried to do my duty by the ship, and now I’m worse off than ever. The captain will never have a bit of use for me after this. I suppose I’ll not only lose my berth at the end of my three months, but he’ll make such an unfavorable report about me that I’ll never have another chance.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Roy. Leave it to me. I know the captain like a book and I know how to fix things up. I don’t wonder you feel as you do about Captain Lansford, but when you really know him, you’ll feel differently. He has his peculiarities, like the rest of us, and one of them is his utter hatred of what he terms newfangled ideas. The greatest pride of his life is the fact that in thirty years at sea he has never lost a man or a ship. If some one can show him that you probably saved his ship from destruction, he’ll have a very different idea of both you and wireless telegraphy.”