Featured Article » Fiction

The Transmitter

Written by Gorg Huff

"But the article says that Monsieur Bell's selenium cells had a resistance of one hundred to three hundred ohms!" Piair La Corrian pointed imperiously at a pile of papers on his desk. "That's a variation of two hundred watts. With one positive and the next negative, four hundred watts. If we run four mirrors on the same turntable with each mirror hitting its own cell so we have four cells running in parallel, that's eight hundred watts positive on the up tick to eight hundred watts negative on the down tick."

"Fine. Build the silly thing. But it won't work." Oliver De Champaign had actually been to Grantville and seen the difficulty they were having in building the Voice of Luther radio station.

***

Ten months and several hundred thousand royals later, Oliver wished he had kept arguing, in spite of the fact that the cardinal had insisted they try every idea, even the most hare-brained. He looked around the room. It was circular, about twenty-eight feet wide, and painted flat black. In the center was an electric motor that he had had bought in Grantville and shipped here to this small estate outside of Paris. On top of the motor was a turntable, on top of the turntable was a reflective pyramid made of four triangular slightly concave mirrors. Above the mirrors, a long black tube went up through the ceiling to a complex collection of reflectors that La Corrian called his ...