hat he knows how to spell these words.

"To be serious about it, if I'm allowed," continued Bill, "this subject
of radio is a coiner in every way. Just think of someone saying
something in San Francisco and someone else in Maine listening to it,
and without any speaking tubes, nor wires to carry the sound along! A
good many folks are wondering how it happens--how speech can be turned
into electricity that goes shooting in all directions and how this is
turned back into speech again.

"Well, it's done on the telephone, over wires. The voice in the receiver
is turned into electric energy that passes over the wires and at the
other end turns again into sounds exactly like the voice that started
it. But somebody found out that this same energy could be shot into the
air in all directions and carried any distance, maybe as far as the
stars, and then when pretty much the same principles were applied to
this as to the telephone, with some more apparatus to send and catch the
energy, why, then, that was wireless.

"It is really too bad, with all the useless short syllables in our
language going to waste, that the fellows who got up the terms for radio
work couldn't have used words like 'grid,' for instance. They could have
called a variocoupler a 'gol,' a potentiometer a 'dit,' an induction
coil a 'lim,' (l-i-m) and a variable condenser would look just as pretty
if it were written out as a 'sos'--but no! They forgot the good example
set by the grid, the volt and the ohm and they went and used
jawbreakers.

"I'll tell you another thing that makes this electro-motive force as
used in wireless easier to understand. It is the sun and its light. A
great scientist, Doctor Steinmetz, says that light and electric waves
are the same thing. Perhaps they are, though they surely work
differently under different conditions. But if the sun has an awful lot
of heat it can't send it ninety-five million miles--not in reason! The
heat only makes light and that light travels through space. It reaches
the atmosphere of our earth and is converted into heat again. Perhaps
light of the sun and stars and the reflected light of the planets do not
shine through space as light, but as radio waves that either by our
atmosphere, or by our electrical conditions here are converted into
light again,--but this is hardly open to proof even."

Bill glanced at the blackboard; Gus had drawn a big sun, with radiating
rays, a grinning face, a small body with on