“Oh! but tuning forks are an old song; and that does not tell all the story about radio. Go on—it’s fascinating.” Dorothy picked up the microphone from the table against the log wall.
“Well! when your voice goes into that it passes along the wire connecting it with the transmitter at the rate of a few hundred vibrations a second.” The girlish radio fan touched the two-foot cabinet containing the sending set. “But that is not speed enough to send a message out into the air, so my blessed Dad says—strength depends upon the rapidity of the vibrations, so the voice passes into this incandescent tube—bulb—where the vibrations are increased, but still not enough to send them out. But they pass on into this other vacuum tube, called the oscillator, where the vibrations are a thousand—and more—a second.”
“Whe-ew!” It was a prolonged whistle-whistle of awe.
“But that, again, would be too high frequency—beyond audibility. But, somehow, the shining bulbs strike an average between them—Dad says it’s a sort of grab game—between them—very difficult for any but the Wizard to understand,” Pem’s black eyebrows went merrily up. “But they do hit it off and the voice goes out into the ether in audio-frequency waves; waves that can be picked up—heard—on the back of an electric carrier wave.”
“Gracious! I’m on the back of a carrier wave now—carried away. I’m riding a winged horse—and not old King.” Lura glanced down at the Long Pasture.
“But who wants to really ‘dig’?” laughed the girl amateur, pulling her switches to disconnect the sets again. “If any one does, there’s a buzzer on the table—code cards. About two-thirds of the stuff that’s sent out is in dot and dash. You can hear twice as far with it.”
“Yes, laugh in dots, cry in dashes, eh,” said Naomi. “Well—I’m ‘game’; I’ll try to be, although I do want to be out on the mountain, sketching—as it’s only our fourth morning here.”
“How—how about you, ‘Jack’?” Pemrose glanced at Una. “Fair play—your father!”
“Revel—Revel is waiting for her morning lump of sugar,” said the latter, pointing archly through the window at the amber shape and floss-silk mane of a dainty little thoroughbred, down in the Long Pasture.
Out there—out there, on the range, all was gayety, irresponsible idleness, for the moment: horses madly racing automobiles that glided by, on a mountain road below, snorting deliriously when brought up by a fence.
