The box from japan, p.15
The Box from Japan, page 15
“And since the lefts are slightly different from the rights, they blur again,” said the student.
“No,” said Braisted, “for here is where old Sebastien Zell’s third patent comes in—a patent which again, unfortunately, involves Mr. Orski’s crystalline substance—Hextite. For the third invention is the ‘Distributing Spectacles’—a simple pair of spectacles containing Hextite lenses of no refractive power whatever, except that the invisible axis of the synthetic crystalline substance of which each lens is made, is at right angles to the axis in the other. That makes them therefore opposites with respect to polarized light transmission. Or, in simpler language, the left lens transmits to the left eye only vertically polarized light—any image being reflected off that big screen up front in horizontally polarized waves cannot get through that lens. The right lens transmits to the right eye only the horizontally polarized waves, which constitute the exact pictures which the right ‘eye’ of the transmitting camera in London is taking. It—but step back to my desk with me.”
Braisted hooked back the swing hatch of the poised camera, locking it carefully into place. With a careful scrutiny of the whole, he snapped off the overhanging bulb, and led the way in silence down the little flight of steps, and thence over to his desk again. Halsey followed him, and dropped down once more in the visitor’s armchair. Braisted seated now back in his swivel chair, opened a closet-like compartment in his desk, revealing a huge tangle of spectacles, about four dozen perhaps, all with quite ordinary steel bows and rims, all locked in each other’s clutches like paralyzed spiders, and all, no doubt, waiting the big gathering of official spectators tomorrow night. He extricated from the tangle two pair, and closed the compartment. He now snapped another button on the side of his desk, and a curious light—or better set of lights—lighted up on an equally curious chart on the opposite wall to where the two men sat. The chart itself was just a huge square, possibly 4 feet by 4 feet, containing fish, birds and dragons in various colors flying around in mid-air, as it were. But at the center of the chart, the source of the light, were four tiny miniature electric bulbs, high power evidently as might be judged by the brilliancy with which they blazed, all close together in a cluster, and comprising a white one, a red one, a bluish-violet one, and a yellow one. Held directly in front of the cluster of bulbs by a projecting arm was a small square sheet, about 4 inches by 4 inches square, of some transparent, glasslike substance.
“Now the light coming from those four bulbs,” Braisted was saying, “is polarized, for the four bulbs all lie together back of a sheet of Hextite crystal whose axis so lies, the way it now stands, that it permits only vertically polarized waves to pass through it. Now hold your spectacles up loosely in front of your eyes—except, however, I want you to close your right eye. Yes, that’s right. With your left eye, now, you see the chart—and the four bulbs back of the glass—or rather Hextite glass?”
“Perfectly.”
“Now revolve the one spectacle lens slowly—so that it rotates in front of that left eye you’re gazing with. Yes, keeping its inner surface facing the eye. And very slowly. The plane of polarization—in the case of that one spectacle lens, of course, it’s a vertical plane at right angles to the surface of the len is so finely defined that the whole field for transmission of light isn’t more than a degree and a half on each side of the plane. That degree and a half, fortunately, protects us a bit on extremely slight errors in setting the lenses in those revolving polarizers. Turn your lens slowly now, please.”
Halsey revolved the transparent lens slowly, keeping it, however, ever with its inner flat surface facing his left eye. And to his amazement, while he still surveyed the chart on the opposite wall, whose birds, fish and dragons remained quite unchanged and quite visible, the entire four little bulbs went out—disappeared completely, in fact—as though they had been turned out by a single switch. He revolved the lens slowly back. The four lights suddenly appeared magically.
“You’ll note,” said Braisted with a smile, “that not only white, but its components red, violet-blue and yellow were all equally polarized—that all went together—all came back together. That is why Hextite is so invaluable with this invention.” He paused, and added an explanation of an unspoken query of his listener’s. “The piscatorial and other figures on the chart, of course, remained ever visible to you because they were reaching your eye in reflected light which contained waves of every plane.”
Halsey nodding, was already lowering his spectacles. So this was the third of old Zell’s patents? The third—of a trio that created stereoscopic vision. He saw now indeed where, in its application to black and white squawkies, it was equally applicable to any camera that took, or flashed, a scene to a screen. He asked one question, pointing at that great stone screen rearing itself above the stage. “And who owns the patent on that?” he asked dubiously.
Braisted laughed. “That is just micro-cross-ruled stalagmite, and nobody owns the patent on that any more so than anyone owns the patent on interferometer devices for measuring the length of light waves. It is merely an outgrowth of interferometry, that’s all. The material in that screen costs about $20; it costs $100 to surface it, but $2200 to micro-cross-rule it. It lasts forever.” He paused. “Micro-cross-ruled stalagmite, as you must gather now, reflects only vertical waves of light and horizontal waves. Not only that, it reflects each kind of wave in the identical plane in which it receives it. In other words, whichever picture falls on it, is reflected back to the audience in light waves of the same plane as that in which it fell upon it.”
Braisted paused.
“And now I’m sure, Mr. Halsey, that everything must be clear to you. As you may or may not know, the retina of the human eye requires 10 to 16 pictures per second to give it the illusion of motion, and taking those figures as a working basis, all we do here in a sense is to produce, as it were, a slightly different colored moving picture for each eye—making the brain fuse the like parts of each, and yet carefully register the unlike parts. And lo—we obtain reality!”
“Yes, I do see everything now,” agreed the younger man. “Everything—well—except perhaps the method of transmission. That is—well—just what is this—this ether-stress beam?”
But as he waited humbly for Braisted’s answer to his question, Halsey could not be expected to know that within less than 32 hours from now he himself was going to be deeply involved, during a singular and exciting ten minutes, with that curious man-made cosmic phenomenon known as the “ether-stress beam”; much less that his involvement was not to take place here in this quiet scientific chamber, a mere spectator of an act or so of Hamlet, played in London far away, but with himself an actor in another drama, played out in its whole thrilling entirety on the dark outskirts of Chicago, London of the West.
CHAPTER XIII
The Beam No Man Could See
“The ether-stress beam,” declared Braisted, “is something which is not absolutely required in this process at all. Due to the tremendous sensitivity of the new Broptillard photo-electric cell, and the fearful intensity of the varying light which pours through those tiny holes in the transmitting scanner from the ion-screen, we can broadcast action on any wave-length which gives a fairly wide kilocycle frequency. We are using the ether-stress beam in these experiments, however, and for the time being only, merely to get complete privacy. There are as you know two companies using the master-patent, the so-called Canadian Ether-Stress Beam Company, Ltd., at Nippiginic River Station, Ontario,—it has two complementary receivers, or what we call co-pulsators, one on the roof of the Clarendon Square Hotel, at Clarendon Square, London, and one on the roof of the L’Equitable Building on the Boulevard Sebastapol, Paris. Then, of course, there’s the other leasing company, the Mexico-Trans Equatorial, with a master pulsator at St. Bonafacio, Mexico, and with co-pulsators at Cape Town, South Africa, and Melbourne, Australia. The master pulsators can be swung through practically 360 degrees of arc—the co-pulsators are fixed. Thus the Nippiginic River pulsator may swing in a few seconds from the London to the Paris one. The Mexico-Trans Equatorial may swing from the Melbourne to the—but I beg your pardon. The Mexico-Trans Equatorial is out of the industrial picture just now, of course. For St. Bonafacio, Mexico, where its master-pulsator is located, has been in the hands of the rebels for some months now, in fact practically ever since the Revolution began, hasn’t it? I’d forgotten entirely for the moment how the Marconi and the cable system are getting all the trans-Pacific and trans-equatorial business just now. At any rate, what I am trying to convey, Mr. Halsey, is that the moment the ether-stress beam is established between any master-pulsator and a co-pulsator, as is evidenced by a tube of ionized mercury vapor, held by an arm directly in front of the master-pulsator, lighting up into a glow—then the only additional power needed to convey messages, broadcasts, etc., over it is less than 5 watts on the Atlantic one, and 10 watts on the trans-equatorial one. This whole performance tomorrow evening will come in from a 5-watt triode, or transmitting radiotron, connected by a short antenna bar thrust directly into the ether-stress beam itself. It will be carried, of course, by special wires, from the Regent Theatre to the Clarendon Square Hotel roof—and likewise by special balanced wire circuit to us here from the Nippiginic River Station, Canada. All clear?”
“Far from clear, I’m afraid,” sighed Halsey. “How—how on earth—can you bring in a whole performance across the Atlantic—on only 5 watts?”
“Because of the tremendous conductivity of the ether-stress beam to so-called wireless waves,” explained Braisted. “It may be likened to a huge copper conductor which can carry the low voltage of a weak battery, where a high resistance conductor would never carry it. What is most remarkable is that when one considers its convolutions, its real conductivity must be enormous, for the low wattage travels a path in actuality 3 or 4 times greater than even the distance between the beam stations.”
“You mean by that—”
“Here, look,” said Braisted, taking out a blank sheet of paper from his top drawer. He commenced drawing on it with his fountain pen as he talked. “This peculiar stressed condition of the ether—that’s as near as we can define it or explain it with our knowledge today—is obtained by two sets of diagonally crossed high-tension meshworks facing each other across space and radiating energy in exact step with each other in what we call synchro=half-wave-length-dephased pulsations. It starts to exist the second the two meshworks are pulsing in unison. It consists of a stress in the ether connecting the two pulsators—as I say, that’s the best explanation I can give. But it isn’t as though that stress lies in a straight blanket-like beam at stress from one pulsator to the other Not like this.” Braisted had completed his diagram. “Imagine this to be the cross-section, longitudinally, of an ether-stress beam, 200 yards wide, as this one really is, traversing a large arc of the earth.”
Halsey surveyed the diagram representing, oddly, that which the ether-stress beam was not! It presented the following appearance:
“But this is the way it really lies,” Braisted went on, now drawing on a second sheet of paper. “We know the general width of the beam, its thickness, and its path—at least that of the trans-Atlantic beam—from the painstaking tests made by plane and ground observation taken by Professors Wilder and Murray of McGill University, Toronto. Their test plane was operated at night. It was fitted with a red electric light marker, and a hanging vacuum tube filled with ionized mercury vapor gas which, as I think I told you, glows purplishly blue whenever it lies in the direct path of the beam. Professor Wilder operated the plane, and Professor Murray took the many observations with a small mounted spy glass from the ground. On a transverse passage through the beam, it was found to be approximately and consistently 600 feet wide, at least at the point in Quebec where the observations were taken, and through any cross-section of the beam consistently about 30 feet. But the finding of the actual longitudinal path of the beam was very trying. Professor Murray, facing it longitudinally, sighted Professor Wilder at several thousand points against the Celestial map of the sky. The points of non-glow and of glow, of the mercury-vapor tube, were then plotted out as a Mercator’s projection of the Celestial sphere—and it was found that the ether-stress beam consists of a fixed, static, non-moving wave of buckled-up ether, around 30 feet thick, as I understand, and lying just like this between two beam stations.” Braisted shoved over another diagram to his listener. “Again,” he explained, “this is but a longitudinal cross-section.”
Halsey surveyed this second diagram. It stood as follows:
“Those convolutions,” Braisted went on, “come within about a sixth of a mile from the earth. That is, their bottoms do. Their tops are from a half mile to a mile higher. Their vertical segments are perhaps a hundred feet apart. Now you can perceive the enormous distance that 5 watts of power travels? It is conductivity—see?—conductivity so great that any source of radiative energy taking place directly in the body of the beam drains off in both directions along the beam. Yet, strangely, any radiative energy taking place outside of the beam passes right through its gaps, unable apparently even to enter it. There must be a sort of surface tension to the beam, the way I reason it.” Braisted paused. “But it’s that convolutionary aspect of the beam which gives pronounced secrecy—comparative secrecy, at any rate—to any broadcasting going on within it. To be sure, a radio-wave receiver of any sort placed anywhere in the actual stress-beam will pick up anything flowing in it. But—put that receiver on a helicopter or gyro which, after all, has to keep always moving at some sort of speed upward or downward—and it’s out of the beam almost as soon as it’s in. Place the receiver on a plane traveling parallel to the surface at the earth—and again it’s out of the beam as soon as it’s in. Then in again, as soon as it’s out. Indeed, anything thus picked or stolen out of the beam would be in segments. Do you see?”
“Yes, I do. More directive than the Marconi, I’d say. How comes it you have to pull in your broadcasted test by wire circuits from Nippiginic River Station, Ontario? Haven’t we a beam station in America?”
“No. Old Montague Maitling, the Canadian electrical engineer who invented synchro=half-wave-length-dephased pulsations, and patented the high-tension diagonally crossed meshworks for producing them, expected the ether-stress beam resulting from them to completely supplant cable as a vehicle for transmission of commercial messages—expected his system, in fact, even to supplant Marconi. In spite of the almost negligible cost of the power needed for transmission over it, the system won’t supplant the older systems because of the huge power consumption needed to start up the master-pulsator; that, plus the abnormal overhead of the equipment necessary to start the pulsator system. Once pulsing together, the master-mesh and the co-mesh, the operating costs to maintain the system are moderate; the transmission costs over it are even still less. The method begins to be comparable in costs with our present commercial systems only when there’s a straight hour or several-hour transmission to go uninterruptedly across it. But it’s got another ten years yet, before it can grab sufficient business to fill its beams continuously so as either to cut out the starting costs entirely—or else spread one starting cost each day over 1440 working minutes comprising a 24-hour day. And it—but I didn’t intend to digress on the economics of commercial transmission. I was going to tell you about old Montague Maitling. He was once rudely searched, back in 1932 or 1933, I think it was, by an officious U. S. Customs officer for a possible pint of whiskey on his hip pocket, when he was coming across the Sault Ste. Marie straits from Canada into the U.S.A. He was so angered that in his distribution of the letters-patent in his estate, as was found when he died two years ago, he provided that, in the leasing of his letters-patent to subsidiary companies, the Maitling ether-stress beam stations could never be established in the United States. The Department of Radio here is quite satisfied. They aren’t particularly warm to them. But the ironic thing is that nearly all the business the Maitling System beam stations have done, through the two companies thus far leasing the patents, has been 95 percent U.S.A. business. The Nippiginic River beam station—that was his home, you know—throws all its U.S.A. messages by wire straight across the Canada-U. S. line to a Western Union receiving office at Fairville, New York, on commission; and the Western Union system distributes them over its lines in America. And the St. Bonafacio station at Mexico, prior to the Revolution which cut of all its wire connections to Texas due to President Almedo’s holding firm control of that narrow strip along the whole northern boundary of Chihuahua, did the same as the Nppiginic River Company, except that they threw their business to a receiving station of the Postal Telegraph System at Cactus Knoll, Texas, and the Postal distributed it over the U.S.A. on commission. So Maitling didn’t achieve much toward cheating American business men out of new channels of communication.’
Braisted paused a second, and then went on.
“As I told you, we here—and I mean Hall 457—have two privates wires—beautifully balanced circuits, both of them—with Nippiginic River. One is to bring in the sound that’s picked up by the ‘gadget’—at least that’s what I call it—in the Regent Theatre; whatever we call it, the ‘gadget’ is just a huge battery of de Mestri microphones, connected to each other in various complicated circuits, and all laid out inside a huge shell, a yard in diameter, directable to any source of audibility. The sound from this focusser travels across the Atlantic Ocean on one kilocycle frequency only. Thc ether-stress beam, however, like the ether of which it is but a compressed and buckled part, is able to carry in itself, at one and the same time, all possible kilocycle frequencies. The visibility, therefore, picked off the British theater stage by the ion-screen, is carried across the ocean on a much higher frequency. That visibility, in turn, is brought to us here from Nippiginic River on the other balanced wire circuit. Thus our two sets of wires. Later on the Consolidated Projection Corporation expects to project an actual sound line on the edge of the camera plate—yes, the ion-screen—and broadcast all, sound and vision, on one wave length. They’re working that out now over at their laboratories. Any further comments—or question, Mr. Halsey?”
