Hm ... wait. There was no reason why you couldn't power every type of vehicle with capacitors. Aircraft could stay aloft a month at a time if desired—a year if nothing wore out; ships could be five years at sea. You wouldn't need those thousands of miles of power line littering the countryside and wasting the energy they carried; you could charge small capacitors for home use right at the station and deliver them to the consumer's doorstep at a fraction of the present cost.
Come to think of it, there was a lot of remote power, in waterfalls for instance, unused now because the distance over which lines would have to be strung was too great. Not any longer! And the sunlight pouring from this cloudless sky—to dilute to run a machine of any size. But you could focus a lot of it on a generator whose output voltage was jacked up, and charge capacitors with thousands of kilowatt-hours each. Generators everywhere could be made a lot smaller, because they wouldn't have to handle peak loads but only meet average demand.
This thing is bigger than I realized, he thought with a tingle of excitement. My God, in a year I may be a millionaire!
He got into Boston, only losing his way twice, which is a good record for anyone, and found the office of Addison, his patent attorney. It didn't take him long to be admitted.
The dusty little man riffled through the pages. "It looks all right," he said unemotionally. Nothing ever seemed to excite him. "For a change, this seems to be something which can be patented, even under our ridiculous laws. Not the law of nature you've discovered, of course, but the process—" He peered up, sharply. "Is there any alternative process?"
"Not that I know of," said Arch. "On the basis of theory, I'm inclined to doubt it."
"Very well, very well. I'll see about putting it through. Hm—you say it's quite simple and cheap? Better keep your mouth shut for a while, till the application has been approved. Otherwise everybody will start making it, and you'll have a devil of a time collecting your royalties. A patent is only a license to sue, you know, and you can't sue fifty million bathtub chemists."
"Oh," said Arch, taken aback. "I—well, I've told some of my neighbors, of course. One of the local teen-agers is going to make a car powered by—"
Addison groaned. "You would! Can't you shoot the boy?"
"I don't want to. For a person his age, he's quite inoffensive."