Jack Carstairs of the power house

by Sydney Sandys

"I'll ask him when I see him. So you're a boxer, are you?"

"Yes, sir. Light weight, though I ought to go middle; eleven stone two pounds, that's my weight. I can get down to ten, but I ain't comfortable, though I 'ave a done it."

Carstairs measured him with his eyes. He seemed very little over five feet. Later on, he ascertained that he was exactly five feet three inches.

"I see. Just wipe over that brass work, will you?"

With remarkable alacrity, and a peculiarly prompt and decisive manner, the man saluted and set about his work.

Carstairs watched him in silence for some minutes, struck more than ever by the appropriateness of his name; he marvelled too at the singularity of his chief. In all that clean and bright engine room there was only that one bit of obscure brass work uncleaned, and the chief had spotted it. "An acutely observant man, evidently," Carstairs meditated.

Later on in the evening, the chief assistant dropped in. He was a big, heavily-built man with a well-shaped, massive head and handsome, even features with general indication of great strength—mental, moral, and physical; the sort of man many women go into ecstasies over: the element of the brute seemed fairly strong in him. To Carstairs' critical eyes and slow, careful scrutiny, he appeared, however, somewhat flabby. He stood behind Carstairs on the switchboard and watched him parallel machines.

Now the process known as "paralleling" or "synchronizing" alternating current dynamos or "alternators" is somewhat critical; the operator has to watch two voltmeters and get their reading exactly alike; he also has to watch two lamps (now usually supplanted by a small voltmeter) which grow dull and bright more or less quickly, from perhaps sixty times a minute to ten or twelve times per minute, as the engine drivers slowly vary the speed of the engines. When the voltmeters are reading alike, and during the small fraction of a minute when the lamps are at their brightest, the operator has to close a fairly ponderous switch; if he is too late or too early, but particularly if he is too late, there are unpleasant consequences: the machines groan and shriek with an awe-inspiring sound, keeping it up very often for a considerable time; all the lamps on the system surge badly, and the needle of every instrument on the switchboard does a little war dance on its own, till the machines settle down. Sometimes the consequences of a "bad shot" are even more dire. There once appeared in one of the technical journals a pathetic little poem about a pupil's "first shot," how "he gazed severely at the voltmeters," and "looked sternly at the lamps," then he "took a howler," and "switched out again," "wished he hadn't," "Plugged in again and—bolted." In a similar journal there was another sort of prose poem, too, written in mediæval English which finished up a long tale of woe thus: "He taketh a flying shot and shutteth down ye station."

This was the operation then (in which every man needs all his wits and some more than they possess) in which Carstairs was engaged at a critical period of the load (for be it remembered the time available is always strictly limited) when the chief assistant stood behind him. He remained calm and impassive, as behoved his countenance, for some time, then, just when the phases were beginning to get longer, and Carstairs took hold of the switch handle in readiness to plug in; the chief assistant stepped excitedly up behind him. "Now! Be careful! Watch your volts! There! There! You might have had that one! Look out, here she comes! Watch your volts, man, watch your volts!"

Carstairs felt like knocking him down, he missed two good phases that he might have taken, then he "plugged in" rather early. The machines groaned a little, but soon settled down.