Radio Boys Cronies by Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

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The work progressed steadily--not too hastily, but most satisfactorily.
Leaving at supper time, Bill's eyes would sparkle as he talked over
their efforts for that day, and quiet Gus would listen with nods and
make remarks of appreciation now and then.

"The way we've made that panel, Gus, with those end cleats doweled on
and the shellacking of both sides--it'll never warp. I'm proud of that
and it was mostly your idea."

"No, yours. I would have grooved the wood and used a tongue, but the
dowels are firmer."

"A tongue would have been all right."

"But, dear boy, the dowels were easier to put in."

"Oh, well, it's done now. To-morrow we'll begin the mounting and wiring.
Then for the aerial!"

But that very to-morrow brought with it the hardest blow the boys had
yet had to face. Full of high spirits, they walked the half mile out to
the Hooper place and found the garage a mass of blackened ruins. It had
caught fire, quite mysteriously, toward morning, and the gardener and
chauffeur, roused by the crackling flames, had worked like beavers but
with only time to push out the two automobiles; they could save nothing
else.

The Hoopers had just risen from breakfast when the boys arrived; at once
Grace came out, and her expressions of regret were such as to imply that
the family had lost nothing, the boys being the only sufferers. And it
_was_ a bit staggering--all their work and machinery and tools and plans
utterly ruined--the lathe and drill a heap of twisted iron. It was with
a rueful face that Bill surveyed the catastrophe.

"Never mind, Billy," said Grace, detecting evidence of moisture in his
eyes; but she went over to smiling Gus and gazed at him in wonder.
"Don't you care?" she asked.

"You bet I care; mostly on Bill's account, though. He had set his heart
mighty strong on this. I'm sorry about your loss, too."

"Oh, never mind that! Dad is 'phoning now for carpenters and his
builder. He'll be out in a minute."

Out he did come, with a shout of greeting; he, too, had sensed that the
real regrets would be with them.

"It'll be all right, me lads!" he shouted. "Herring'll be here on the
next train, with a bunch o' men, an' I'll git your dad, Gus, too. Must
have this building up just like it was in ten days. An' now count up
just what you lads have lost; the hull sum total, b'jinks! I'm goin' to
be the insurance comp'ny in this deal."

"The insurance company!" Bill exclaimed and Gus stared.

"Sure. Goin' to make up your loss an' then some. I'm a heap int'rested
in this Eddy's son business, ain't I? Think I ain't wantin' to see that
there contraption that hears a hunderd miles off? Get busy an' give me
the expense. We've got to git a-goin'."

"But, Mr. Hooper, our loss isn't yours and you have got enough to--"

"Don't talk; figger! I'm runnin' this loss business. Don't want to make
me mad; eh? Git at it an' hurry up!" He turned and walked away. Grace
followed in a moment, but over her shoulder remarked to the wondering
boys:

"Do as Dad says if you want to keep our friendship. Dad isn't any sort
of a piker,--you know that."

The insistency was too direct; "the queen's wish was a command." The
boys would have to comply and they could get square with their good
friends in the end. So at it they went, Bill with pad and pencil, Gus
calling out the items as his eye or his memory gleaned them from the
hard-looking objects in the burned mass as he raked it over. Presently
Grace came out again.

"Dad wants the list and the amount," she said. "He's got to go to the
city with Mr. Herring."

Bill handed over his pad and she was gone, to return as quickly in a few
minutes.

"Here is an order on the bank; you can draw the cash as you need it. You
can start working in the stable loft; then bring your stuff over. There
will be a watchman on the grounds from to-night, so don't worry about
any more fires. I must go help get Dad off."

Once more she retreated; again she stopped to say something, as an
afterthought, over her shoulder:

"And, boys, won't you let Skeets and me help you some? Skeets will be
here again next week and I love to tinker and contrive and make all
sorts of things; it'll be fun to see the radio receiver grow."

"Sure, you can," said Gus; and Bill nodded, adding: "We have only a
limited time now, and any help will count a lot."

Going down to the bank, Bill again outlined the work in detail,
suggesting the purchases of even better machinery and tools, of only the
best grades of materials. There must be another trip to the city, the
most strenuous part of the work.

"We'll get it through on time, I guess," said Bill.

"I'm not thinking so much of that as about how that fire started," said
Gus.

"It couldn't have been any of our chemicals, could it?"

"Chem--? My eye! Don't you know, old chap? I'll bet Mr. Hooper and Grace
have the correct suspicion."

"More crooked business? You don't mean--"

"Sure, I do! Thad, of course. And, Bill, we're going to get him, sooner
or later. Mr. Hooper won't want to stand this sort of thing forever.
I've got a hunch that we're not through with that game yet."

CHAPTER XX

"TO LABOR AND TO WAIT"

It was truly astonishing what well organized labor could do under
intelligent direction; the boys had a fine example of this before them
and a fine lesson in the accomplishment. The new garage grew into a new
and somewhat larger building, on the site of the old, almost over night.
There were three eight-hour shifts of men and two foremen, with the
supervising architect and Mr. Grier apparently always on the job. As
soon as the second floor was laid, the roof on and the sheathing in
place, Bill and Gus moved in. The men gave them every aid and Mr. Grier
gave special attention to building their benches, trusses, a
drawing-board stand, shelving and tool chests. Then, how those new radio
receivers did come on!

Grace and Skeets were given little odd jobs during the very few hours of
their insistent helping. They varnished, polished, oiled, cleaned copper
wire, unpacked material, even swept up the _debris_ left by the
carpenters; at least, they did until Skeets managed to fall headlong
down about one-half of the unfinished stairway and to sprain her ankle.
Then Grace's loyalty compelled her attention to her friend.

Mr. Hooper breezed in from time to time, but never to take a hand; to do
so would have seemed quite out of place, though the old gentleman
laughingly made an excuse for this:

"Lads, I ain't no tinker man; never was. Drivin' a pesky nail's a
huckleberry above my persimmon. Cattle is all I know, an' I kin still
learn about them, I reckon. But I know what I kin see an' hear an',
b'jinks, I'm still doubtin' I'm ever goin' to hear that there Eddy's son
do this talkin'. But get busy, lads; get busy!"

"Oh, fudge, Dad! Can't you see they're dreadfully busy? You can't hurry
them one bit faster." Grace was ever just.

"No," said Skeets, who had borrowed Bill's crutch to get into the shop
for a little while. "No, Mr. Hooper; if they were to stay up all night,
go without eats and work twenty-five hours a day they couldn't do any--"
And just then the end of the too-much inclined crutch skated outward and
the habitually unfortunate girl dropped kerplunk on the floor. Gus and
Grace picked her up. She was not hurt by her fall. Her very plumpness
had saved her.

"For goodness' sake, Skeets, are you ever going to get the habit of
keeping yourself upright?" asked Grace, who laughed harder than the
others, except Skeets herself; the stout girl generally got the utmost
enjoyment out of her own troubles.

Quiet restored, Mr. Hooper returned to his subject.

"I reckon you lads, when you git this thing made that's goin' to hoodoo
the air, will be startin' in an' tryin' somethin' else; eh?" he
ventured, grinning.

"Later, perhaps, but not just yet," Bill replied. "Not until we can
manage to learn a lot more, Gus and I. Mr. Grier says that the
competition of brains nowadays is a lot sharper than it was in Edison's
young days, and even he had to study and work a lot before he really did
any big inventing. Professor Gray says that a technical education is
best for anyone who is going to do things, though it is a long way from
making a fellow perfect and must be followed up by hard practice."

"And we can wait, I guess," put in Gus.

"Until we can manage in some way to scrape together enough cash to buy
books and get apparatus for experiments and go on with our schooling."

"We want more physics and especially electricity," said Gus.

"And other knowledge as well, along with that," Bill amended.

"I reckon you fellers is right," said Mr. Hooper, "but I don't know
anything about it. I quit school when I was eleven, but that ain't
sayin' I don't miss it. If I had an eddication now, like you lads is
goin' to git, er like the Perfesser has, I'd give more'n half what I
own. Boys that think they're smart to quit school an' go to work is
natchal fools. A feller may git along an' make money, but he'd make a
heap more an' be a heap happier, 'long of everything else, if he'd got a
schoolin'. An' any boy that's got real sand in his gizzard can buckle
down to books an' get a schoolin', even if he don't like it. What I'm a
learnin' nowadays makes me know that a feller can make any old study
int'restin' if he jes' sets down an' looks at it the right way."

"That's what Gus and I think. There are studies we don't like very much,
but we can make ourselves like them for we've got to know a lot about
them."

"Grammar, for instance," said Gus.

"Sure. It is tiresome stuff, learning a lot of rules that work only
half. But if a fellow is going to be anybody and wants to stand in with
people, he's got to know how to talk correctly and write, too." Bill's
logic was sound.

"Daddy should have had a drilling in grammar," commented Grace,
laughing.

"Oh, you!" blurted Skeets. "Mr. Hooper can talk so that people
understand him--and when you _do_ talk," she turned to the old
gentleman, "I notice folks are glad to listen, and so is Grace."

"But, my dear," protested the subject of criticism, "they'd listen
better an' grin less if I didn't sling words about like one o' these
here Eye-talians shovelin' dirt."

"You just keep a-shovelin', Mr. Hooper, your own way," said Bill, "and
if we catch anybody even daring to grin at you, why, I'll have Gus land
on them with his famous grapple!"

Mr. Hooper threw back his coat, thrust his thumbs into the armholes of
his big, white vest and swelled out his chest.

"Now, listen to that! An' this from a lad who ain't got a thing to
expect from me an' ain't had as much as he's a-givin' me, either--an'
knows it. But that's nothin' else but Simon pure frien'ship, I take it.
An' Gus, here, him an' Bill, they think about alike; eh, Gus?" Gus
nodded and the old gentleman continued, addressing his remarks to his
daughter and Skeets:

"Now, if I know anything at all about anything at all I know what I'm
goin' to do. I ain't got no eddication, but that ain't goin' to keep me
from seein' some others git it. You Gracie, fer one, an' you, too,
Skeeter, if your old daddy'll let you come an' go to school with Gracie.
But that ain't all; if you lads kin git ol' Eddy's son out o' the air on
this contraption you're makin' an' hear him talk fer sure, I'm goin' to
see to it that you kin git all the tec--tec--what you call
it?--eddication there is goin' an' I'm goin' to put Perfesser Gray wise
on that, too, soon's he comes back. No--don't you say a word now. I
know what I'm a-doin'." With that the old gentleman turned and marched
out of the shop. But at the bottom of the garage steps he called back:

"Say, boys, I gotta go away fer a couple o' weeks, or mebbe three. Push
it right along an' mebbe you'll be hearin' from old man Eddy's son when
I git back!"

CHAPTER XXI

EARLY STRUGGLES

The receiving outfits were completed; the aerials had been put up, one
installed at the garage, the other at the mansion. Grace naturally had
all, the say about placing the one in her home. The aerial, of four
wires, each thirty feet long and parallel, were attached equi-distant,
and at each end to springy pieces of ash ten feet long, these being
insulators in part and sustained by spiral spring cables, each divided
by a glass insulator block, the extended cables being fastened to a
maple tree and the house chimney. The ground wire went down the side of
the house beside a drain pipe.

The house receiver, in a cabinet that had cost the boys much painstaking
labor, was set by a window and, after Grace and Skeets had been
instructed how to tune the instrument to varying wave lengths, they and
good Mrs. Hooper enjoyed many delightful periods of listening in, all
zealously consulting the published programs from the great broadcasting
stations.

The other outfit made by the boys, which, except the elaborate box and
stand, was an exact duplicate of the Hooper receiver, was taken to the
Brown cottage. Gus insisted that Bill had the best right to it, and as
the Griers and Mrs. Brown had long been the best of friends and lived
almost next door to each other, all the members of the carpenter's
family would be welcome to listen in whenever they wanted to. The little
evening gatherings at certain times for this purpose were both mirthful
and delightful.

The boys' aerial was a three-wire affair, stretching forty feet, and
erected in much the same way as that at the Hooper house, except that
one mast had to be put up as high as the gable end of the cottage, which
was the other support, thirty-five feet high.

Then, when the announcement was made that the talks on Edison were to be
repeated, Bill and Gus told the class and others of their friends, so
the Hoopers came also, the merry crowd filling the Brown living-room.
Mr. Hooper's absence was noted and regretted from the first, as his
eagerness "to be shown" was well known to them all.

The first lectures concerning Edison's boyhood were repeated. The second
and third talks were each better attended than the preceding ones. Cora,
Dot, Skeets and two other girls occupied the front row; Ted Bissell and
Terry Watkins were present. Bill presided with much dignity, most
carefully tuning in, making the announcements, then becoming the most
interested listener, the theme being ever dear to him.

On the occasion of the third lecture, Bill said:

"Now, then, classmates and other folks, this is a new one to all of us.
The last was where we left off in June on the Professor's receiver. You
can just bet this is going to be a pippin. First off, though, is a
violin solo by--by--oh, I forget his name,--and may it be short and
sweet!"

After the music, the now well-known voice came from the horn:

"This is the third talk on the career and accomplishments of Thomas Alva
Edison:

"In a little while young Edison began to get tired of the humdrum life
of a telegraph operator in Boston. As I have told you, after the
vote-recorder, he had invented a stock ticker and started a quotation
service in Boston. He opened operations from a room over the Gold
Exchange with thirty to forty subscribers.

"He also engaged in putting up private lines, upon which he used an
alphabetical dial instrument for telegraphing between business
establishments, a forerunner of modern telephony. This instrument was
very simple and practical, and any one could work it after a few
minutes' explanation.

"The inventor has described an accident he suffered and its effect on
him:

"'In the laboratory,' he says, 'I had a large induction coil. One day I
got hold of both electrodes of this coil, and it clinched my hands on
them so that I could not let go!

"'The battery was on a shelf. The only way I could get free was to back
off and pull the coil, so that the battery wires would pull the cells
off the shelf and thus break the circuit. I shut my eyes and pulled, but
the nitric acid splashed all over my face and ran down my back.

"'I rushed to a sink, which was only half big enough, and got in as well
as I could, and wiggled around for several minutes to let the water
dilute the acid and stop the pain. My face and back were streaked with
yellow; the skin was thoroughly oxidized.

"'I did not go on the street by daylight for two weeks, as the
appearance of my face was dreadful. The skin, however, peeled off, and
new skin replaced it without any damage.'

"The young inventor went to New York City to seek better fortunes. First
he tried to sell his stock printer and failed in the effort. Then he
returned to Boston and got up a duplex telegraph--for sending two
messages at once over one wire. He tried to demonstrate it between
Rochester and New York City. After a week's trial, his test did not
work, partly because of the inefficiency of his assistant.

"He had run in debt eight hundred dollars to build this duplex
apparatus. His other inventions had cost considerable money to make, and
he had failed to sell them. So his books, apparatus and other belongings
were left in Boston, and when he returned to New York he arrived there
with but a few cents in his pocket. He was very hungry. He walked the
streets in the early morning looking for breakfast but with so little
money left that he did not wish to spend it.

"Passing a wholesale tea house, he saw a man testing tea by tasting it.
The young inventor asked the 'taster' for some of the tea. The man
smiled and held out a cup of the fragrant drink. That tea was Thomas A.
Edison's first breakfast in New York City.

"He walked back and forth hunting for a telegraph operator he had known,
but that young man was also out of work. When Edison finally found him,
all his friend could do was to lend him a dollar!

"By this time Edison was nearly starved. With such limited resources he
gave solemn thought to what he should select that would be most
satisfying. He decided to buy apple dumplings and coffee, and in telling
afterward of his first real 'eats' in New York, Mr. Edison said he never
had anything that tasted so good.

"Just as young Ben Franklin, on arriving in New York City from Boston,
looked for a job in a printing office, the youthful modern inventor
applied for work in a telegraph office there. As there was no vacancy
and he needed the rest of his borrowed dollar for meals, Edison found
lodging in the battery room of the Gold Indicator Company.

"It was four years after the Civil War and, besides there being much
unemployment, the fluctuations in the value of gold, as compared with
the paper currency of that day, made it necessary to have gold
'indicators' something like the tickers from the Stock Exchange to-day.
Dr. Laws, presiding officer of the Gold Exchange, had recently invented
a system of gold indicators, which were placed in brokers' offices and
operated from the Gold Exchange.

"When Edison got permission to spend the night in the battery room of
this company, there were about three hundred of these instruments
operating in offices in all directions in lower New York City.

"On the third day after his arrival, while sitting in this office, the
complicated instrument sending quotations out on all the lines made a
very loud noise, and came to a sudden stop with a crash. Within two
minutes over three hundred boys---one from every broker's office in the
street--rushed upstairs and crowded the long aisle and office where
there was hardly room for one-third that number, each yelling that a
certain broker's wire was out of order, and that it must be fixed at
once.

"It was pandemonium, and the manager got so wild that he lost all
control of himself. Edison went to the indicator, and as he had already
studied it thoroughly, he knew right where the trouble was. He went
right out to see the man in charge, and found Dr. Laws there also--the
most excited man of all!

"The Doctor demanded to know what caused all the trouble, but his man
stood there, staring and dumb. As soon as Edison could get Laws'
attention he told him he knew what the matter was.

"'Fix it! Fix it! and be quick about it!' Dr. Laws shouted.

"Edison went right to work and in two hours had everything in running
order. Dr. Laws came in to ask the inventor's name and what he was
doing. When told, he asked the young man to call on him in his office
the next day. Edison did so and Laws said he had decided to place Edison
in charge of the entire plant at a salary of three hundred dollars a
month!

"This was such a big jump from any wages he had ever received that it
quite paralyzed the youthful inventor. He felt that it was too much to
last long, but he made up his mind he would do his best to earn that
salary if he had to work twenty hours a day. He kept that job, making
improvements and devising other stock tickers, until the Gold and Stock
Telegraph Company consolidated with the Gold Indicator Company."

CHAPTER XXII

FAME AND FORTUNE

"At twenty-two," the lecturer continued, "while Edison was with the Gold
and Stock Telegraph Company, he often heard Jay Gould and 'Jim' Fisk,
the great Wall Street operators of that day, talk over the money market.
At night he ate his lunches in the coffee-house in Printing House
Square, where he used to meet Henry J. Raymond, founder of _The New York
Times_, Horace Greeley of the _Tribune_ and James Gordon Bennett of the
_Herald_, the greatest trio of journalists in the world. One of the most
memorable remarks made by a frequenter of this night lunch, as recorded
by Mr. Edison was:

"'This is a great place; a plate of cakes, a cup of coffee, and a
Russian bath, all for ten cents!'

"The so-called bath was on account of the heat of the crowded room.

"Mr. Edison tells this story of the terrible panic in Wall Street, in
September, 1869, brought on chiefly by the attempt of Jay Gould and his
associates to corner the gold market:

"'On Black Friday we had a rather exciting time with our indicators. The
Gould and Fisk crowd had cornered the gold and had run up the quotations
faster than the indicator could record them. In the morning it was
quoting 150 premium while Gould's agents were bidding 165 for five
millions or less.

"'There was intense excitement. Broad and other streets in the Wall
Street district were crammed with crazy crowds. In the midst of the
excitement, Speyer, another large operator, became so insane that it
took five men to hold him. I sat on the roof of a Western Union booth
and watched the surging multitudes.

"'A Western Union man I knew came up and said to me: "Shake hands,
Edison. We're all right. We haven't got a cent to lose."'

"After the company with which our young inventor was connected had sold
out its inventions and improvements to the Gold and Stock Telegraph
Company, Mr. Edison produced a machine to print gold quotations instead
of merely indicating them. The attention of the president of the Gold
and Stock Company was attracted to the success of the wonderful young
inventor.

"Edison had produced quite a number of inventions. One of these was the
special ticker which was used many years in other large cities, because
it was so simple that it could be operated by men less expert than the
operators in New York. It was used also on the London Stock Exchange.

"After he had gotten up a good many inventions and taken out patents for
them, the president of the big company came to see him and was shown a
simple device to regulate tickers that had been printing figures wrong.
This thing saved a good deal of labor to a large number of men, and
prevented trouble for the broker himself. It impressed the president so
much that he invited Edison into his private office and said, in a stage
whisper:

"'Young man, I would like to settle with you for your inventions here.
How much do you want for them?"

"Edison had thought it all over and had come to the conclusion that, on
account of the hard night-and-day work he had been doing, he really
ought to have five thousand dollars, but he would be glad to settle for
three thousand, if they thought five thousand was too much. But when
asked point-blank, he hadn't the courage to name either sum--thousands
looked large to him then--so he hesitated a bit and said:

"'Well, General, suppose _you_ make _me_ an offer.'

"'All right,' said the president. 'How would forty thousand dollars
strike you?'

"Young Edison came as near fainting then as he ever did in his life. He
was afraid the 'General' would hear his heart thump, but he said quietly
that he thought that amount was just about right. A contract was drawn
up which Edison signed without reading.

"Forty thousand dollars was written in the first check Thomas A. Edison
ever received. With throbbing heart and trembling fingers he took it to
the bank and handed it in to the paying teller, who looked at it
disapprovingly and passed it back, saying something the young inventor
could not hear because of his deafness. Thinking he had been cheated,
Edison went out of the bank, as he said, 'to let the cold sweat
evaporate.'

"Then he hurried back to the president and demanded to know what it all
meant. The president and his secretary laughed at the green youth's
needless fears and explained that the teller had probably told him to
write his name on the back of the check. They not only showed him how to
endorse it, but sent a clerk to the bank to identify him--because of the
large amount of money to be paid over.

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