Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660Gernsback, Hugo
Science
Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660
Gernsback, Hugo
Science fiction
To anyone unacquainted with the tremendous force under the control of
Ralph 124C 41 +, but having the temerity to insulate himself and stand
on a nearby roof there would have been visible an unusual sight. He
would also have undergone some remarkable experiences.
The uninitiated stranger standing--well insulated--on a roof not very
far off from Ralph's laboratory, would have witnessed the following
remarkable phenomena:
As soon as Ralph threw the power of the Ultra-Generator on his aerial,
the latter began to shoot out hissing flames in the direction of
West-by-South.
As Ralph kept turning on more power, the flames became longer and
the sound louder. The heavy iridium wires of the large aerial became
red-hot, then yellow, then dazzling white, and the entire mast became
white-hot. Just as the observer could hardly endure the shrill hissing
sound of the outflowing flames any more, the sound stopped altogether,
abruptly, and simultaneously the whole landscape was plunged into such
a pitch-black darkness as he had never experienced before. He could
not even see his hand before his eyes. The aerial could not be seen
either, although he could feel the tremendous energy still flowing away.
What had happened? The aerial on top of Ralph's house had obtained such
a tremendously high frequency, and had become so strongly energyzed,
that it acted toward the ether much the same as a vacuum pump acts on
the air.
The aerial for a radius of some forty miles attracted the ether so
fast that a new supply could not spread over this area with sufficient
rapidity.
Inasmuch as light waves cannot pass through space without the medium
of ether, _it necessarily follows that the entire area upon which the
aerial acted was dark_.
The observer who had never before been in an etherless hole (the
so-called negative whirlpool), experienced some remarkable sensations
during the twenty minutes that followed.
It is a well known fact that heat waves cannot pass through space
without their medium, ether, the same as an electric bell, working in
a vacuum, cannot be heard outside of the vacuum, because sound waves
cannot pass through space without their medium, the air.
No sooner had the darkness set in, than a peculiar feeling of numbness
and passiveness would have come over him.
As long as he was in the etherless space, _he absolutely stopped
growing older_, as no combustion nor digestion can go on without ether.
_He furthermore had lost all sense of heat or cold._ His pipe, hot
previously, was neither hot nor cold to his touch. His own body could
not grow cold as its heat could not be given off to the atmosphere,
nor could his body grow cold, even if he had sat on a cake of ice,
because there was no ether to permit the heat to pass from one atom to
another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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