Radio Boys Loyalty; Or, Bill Brown Listens In

by Wayne Whipple; S. F. Aaron

“To be serious about it, if I’m allowed,” continued Bill, “this subject of radio is a coiner in every way. Just think of someone saying something in San Francisco and someone else in Maine listening to it, and without any speaking tubes, nor wires to carry the sound along! A good many folks are wondering how it happens—how speech can be turned into electricity that goes shooting in all directions and how this is turned back into speech again.

“Well, it’s done on the telephone, over wires. The voice in the receiver is turned into electric energy that passes over the wires and at the other end turns again into sounds exactly like the voice that started it. But somebody found out that this same energy could be shot into the air in all directions and carried any distance, maybe as far as the stars, and then when pretty much the same principles were applied to this as to the telephone, with some more apparatus to send and catch the energy, why, then, that was wireless.

“It is really too bad, with all the useless short syllables in our language going to waste, that the fellows who got up the terms for radio work couldn’t have used words like ‘grid,’ for instance. They could have called a variocoupler a ‘gol,’ a potentiometer a ‘dit,’ an induction coil a ‘lim,’ (l-i-m) and a variable condenser would look just as pretty if it were written out as a ‘sos’—but no! They forgot the good example set by the grid, the volt and the ohm and they went and used jawbreakers.

“I’ll tell you another thing that makes this electro-motive force as used in wireless easier to understand. It is the sun and its light. A great scientist, Doctor Steinmetz, says that light and electric waves are the same thing. Perhaps they are, though they surely work differently under different conditions. But if the sun has an awful lot of heat it can’t send it ninety-five million miles—not in reason! The heat only makes light and that light travels through space. It reaches the atmosphere of our earth and is converted into heat again. Perhaps light of the sun and stars and the reflected light of the planets do not shine through space as light, but as radio waves that either by our atmosphere, or by our electrical conditions here are converted into light again,—but this is hardly open to proof even.”

Bill glanced at the blackboard; Gus had drawn a big sun, with radiating rays, a grinning face, a small body with one short leg and two gesturing hands and had labeled it “Bill Brown, radio radiator.” Bill made a motion of his thumb toward the caricature, then spread his hands in mock despair, but not without a side glance expressing pride in his lieutenant’s performance, all of which pleased the audience immensely.

Then Bill proceeded: “This electro-motive force which travels around and through our little earth is what we can actually experiment with. We do not know just what it is, but we are finding out pretty fast what it will do. Perhaps there is hardly any limit to what it will do. It is generated for power and light and heat, for carrying signals and sounds over wires and through the air. What next? Just now we have got all the thinking we can do about radio. It is the sixth wonder that electricity has sprung upon us. I guess we won’t include electrocution.

“Now, there’s no use going into technicalities about construction, that’s a thing that must be studied out and thought over, not mussed up in a talk like this. I’ll say this much, however, it is the vacuum or audion tube detector that gives results, and the application of a loud speaker is only possible with a vacuum or audion tube. It is as easy to build a vacuum tube set as a crystal set and only a very little more expensive. So, whether you are building or buying a set, make it a good set, something that you can hear with a good many hundred miles.

“Now, you can buy the parts and build a receiving set that will generally give more satisfaction than a bought set.” (Bill stepped over to the blackboard and took up a pointer.) “I may need this for this partner of mine if he persists in caricaturing me instead of drawing what we want. We’ll make things about four times as big as they ought to be. You can use an aërial outdoors, which everybody now understands, or, just as well and a lot handier, a loop aërial indoors, the bigger the better, but two feet in diameter is big enough.

“Here is your base and upright panel and this is the way to hook up or wire the parts. Here’s your aërial and its ground, between which is placed your variable condenser and tuning coil, thus, off here between condenser and coil comes the wire to your vacuum tube, with its fixed condenser and grid leads, the wire being connected directly to the grid, while here the wire from the tube plate is connected with the six-volt storage battery and in turn with the phones, like this. Then, from the phones to the ground wire, the wire is carried thus through a secondary dry cell battery, on each side of which the wires are taken off to a rheostat, though my partner has sketched this to look more like a bird after a caterpillar.

“I am not going to tell you how to make all these parts—if I did you’d probably go to sleep, if you are not half way there already. So, if you can’t find out how to make the parts, or contrive them in some way yourself, why, then, you’d better buy them. Only you can make the base and do the wiring, attaching and so forth. Even my partner can do that if he is watched pretty closely; it is almost as easy as making a sketch of it.