“W’ot’s wicey wersa, Mr Wright?”
“Oh, it means the terms being changed—turned the other way, you know—back to the front, as it were—in short, I mean the battery being in America and the bit of iron in Ireland.”
“Well, well, who’d a thought there was so much in wicey wersa; but go on, Mr Wright.”
“Now, you must suppose,” continued Robin, “that a needle, like the mariner’s compass needle, hangs beside my bit of iron, close to it, and that a wire, or conductor of electricity, connects the iron with my electric battery in Ireland. Well, that makes a magnet of it, and the suspended needle, being attracted, sticks to it. Then I disconnect the wire from my battery by touching a handle, the bit of iron ceases to be a magnet, and the needle was free. Again I connect the battery, and the needle flies to the remagnetised bit of iron. Thus, as fast as I choose, I can make the needle wag, and by a simple arrangement we can make it wag right or left, so many beats right or left, or alternately, representing letters. By varying the beats we vary the letters, and thus spell out our messages. Now, do you understand it?”
“I ain’t quite sure that I does,” replied Vulcan; “I’ve got a hazy notion that by touchin’ and removin’ the touch from a conductor, connecting and disconnecting wires and batteries, you can make electricity flow just as you let on or stop water by turnin’ a stopcock—”
“Not exactly,” interrupted Robin, “because, you see, electricity does not really flow, not being a substance.”
“Not a substance, sir! w’y, w’ot is it then?”
“Like light and sound, it is merely an effect, an influence, a result,” answered Robin. “We only use the word flow, and talk of electricity as a fluid, for convenience’ sake.”
“Well, w’otever it is or isn’t,” continued the puzzled Vulcan, gazing at vacancy for a few seconds, “when you’ve set it agoin’—or set agoin’ the things as sets it agoin’—you make a suspended needle wag, and when you stop it you make the needle stop waggin’, and by the way in which that there needle wags you can spell out the letters o’ the alphabit—so many wags to the right bein’ one letter, so many wags to the left bein’ another letter, an’ so on,—so that, what between the number o’ wags an’ the direction o’ the waggin’s, you—you come for to—there, I’m lost again, an’ I must go in for another spell wi’ the sledge, so we’ll have to tackle the subject another time, Mr Wright.”
Thus speaking, Vulcan seized the ponderous hammer in his powerful grasp and proceeded to beat form into a mass of glowing metal with much greater ease than he had been able to thump telegraphy into his own brain.