"Electric field's entirely inside the slab," said Arch absently. "You need a solid conductor, like a wire, between the poles to discharge it. The breakdown voltage is so high that you might as well forget about it." He lifted a piece about ten inches square and two inches thick. "You could charge this hunk up with enough juice to run our house for a couple of years, I imagine; of course, it'd be D.C., so you'd have to drain it through a small A.C. generator. The material itself costs, oh, I'd guess fifty cents, a dollar maybe if you include labor." He hesitated. "You know, it occurs to me we've just killed the wet-cell battery."
"Good riddance," said Elizabeth. "The first thing you do, my boy, is make a replacement for that so-called battery in our car. I'm tired of having the clunk die in the middle of traffic."
"Okay," said Arch mildly. "Then we see about patents. But—honey, don't you think this deserves a small celebration of sorts?"
Arch spent a few days drawing up specifications and methods of manufacture. By giving the subject a little thought, he discovered that production could be fantastically cheap and easy. If you knew just what was needed, you had only to mix together a few chemicals obtainable in any drugstore, bake them in your oven for several hours, and saw the resulting chunk into pieces of suitable size. By adding resistances and inductances, which could be made if necessary from junkyard wire, you could bleed off the charge at any desired rate.
Culquhoun's oldest son Robert dropped over to find Arch tinkering with his rickety '48 Chevrolet. "Dad says you've got a new kind of battery," he remarked.
"Uh.... Yes. I'll make him one if he wants. All we'll need to charge it is a rectifier and a volt-meter. Need a regulator for the discharge, of course." Arch lifted out his old battery and laid it on the grass.
"I've got a better idea, sir," said the boy. "I'd like to buy a big piece of the stuff from you."
"Whatever for?" asked Arch.
"Run my hot rod off it," said Bob from the lofty eminence of sixteen years. "Shouldn't be too hard, should it? Rip out the engine; use the big condenser to turn a D.C. motor—it'd be a lot cheaper than gas, and no plugged fuel lines either."