CHAPTER XI 



SOLVING THE RIDDLES OF SPACE 

 The Achievements of Sir Oliver Lodge 



ON a December day in 1904 a tall man in a long 

 brown overcoat stood in a courtyard of Birming- 

 ham University. The air was thick with one of 

 Birmingham's worst brand of winter fogs; not even a 

 London ' particular ' is thicker than the really bad Midland 

 fog. The tall man was Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of 

 Birmingham University, who was engaged in examining 

 certain strands of wire which passed upward and 

 vanished in the impenetrable gloom a few feet overhead. 



Presently there came from somewhere near by the 

 vicious crackle of a powerful electric discharge, and great 

 jagged sparks shot to and fro between the spherical ter- 

 minals of an apparatus in the research laboratory out- 

 side which Sir Oliver was standing. Men pulled the 

 terminals apart, and as the discharge was transferred to 

 the outside wires there came from above a sharp fizzling 

 like the sound of water dropping on red-hot metal. 



Then a strange thing happened. The solid fog-bank 

 thinned. There was no wind to drive it away. It simply 

 thinned, and the outlines of the lofty University building 

 gradually developed like the image on a photographic 

 plate. The fog turned to cloud, the cloud to mist, and 

 high overhead there became visible the insulators in which 

 the wires terminated. When the current was shut off the 

 biting fog crept back and in a few minutes filled the space 

 which had been so strangely cleared. A second experi- 

 ment of the same kind was made a little later at Liver- 

 pool. One discharging pole was erected, and a thick 



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