Now I don’t know whether you know anything about wireless, but I will say here that while you can only send over short distances with a good sized sending apparatus, you can receive over quite long distances with a cheap receiver if you have a fairly decent aerial, by which I mean one that is high enough above the ground and has a long enough stretch, and, of course, it must be properly insulated. Not only this, but a sending apparatus of any size costs much money and takes a lot of current to work it. On the other hand a receiving apparatus can be bought for a few dollars and can be used without any current at all, though it gives louder signals when a dry cell is used. Just as soon as my wireless pals found I’d got the _bug_ they all jumped in and helped me _rig_ up the aerial. We strung it up between a tree at the back end of our lot and the gable at the side of the house so that it was about fifteen feet high at one end, thirty feet high at the other end and fifty feet long--a very respectable aerial. We ran the _leading in_ wire to the window of my printing office. Outside the window frame we screwed a _lightning switch_. Next we fastened the _rat-tail_ of the aerial to one of the middle posts, and from the other lower post we ran a wire down to the ground and into the basement, where we clamped it on to the water pipe, and this made the _ground_. This done we connected the other end of the switch with a wire and ran it through an insulator in the window sash so that it could be fixed to the instruments when I got them. “Won’t those wires attract the lightning, Jack?” my mother asked, eyeing it dubiously after the aerial was all up. I was just about to tell her I had never thought of that, when Bob jumped in and explained it all as intelligently as though he were Sir Oliver Lodge lecturing on wireless before the Royal Society. “You see, Mrs. Heaton,” he began, “an aerial when it is properly put up like this one really protects a house from lightning just as a lightning rod does, only better. Before a storm the air is charged with electricity and as the aerial is connected with the ground through that switch up there, the electricity as fast as it is formed is carried to the ground and this prevents enough of it from gathering to make a lightning stroke.” Mother’s eyes brightened hopefully as she looked on this smart boy. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she said, and went into the house perfectly satisfied that I was in good company. The next move on my part was to get the receiving apparatus. This consisted of a _detector_, a _tuning coil_, a _dry cell_, a _potentiometer_, and a pair of _head telephone receivers_ or head-phones as they are called for short. Bob helped me to make the detector because he said he could make a better detector than I could buy. When I got everything ready to _hook up_ I was terribly nervous for I could hardly wait to try them out.