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Updated: May 5, 2025
He turned the handle just the fragment of an inch and a queer smile came over his face. Then he crept as silently upstairs, opened the window of the bathroom quietly, and slipped on to the leads. There were a couple of insulators here, against the wire of one of which Henson tapped his knuckles gently. The wire gave back an answering twang. The other jangled limp and loose.
And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed his knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blacked up for a modern minstrel show.
Left as we were at the beginning of a second winter without men, tools, or materials of any kind, except 50,000 insulators and brackets, we could do nothing toward the construction of the line, and our only resource was to make our unpleasant situation known to the Company.
Obviously, since water and moist earth is a conductor, a wire to convey an electric current must be insulated if it is intended to lie at the bottom of the sea or buried underground. The best materials for the purpose yet discovered are gutta-percha and india-rubber, which are both flexible and very good insulators.
Some of them who had 'superior knowledge' told me the down-lead must have no bends. I got hold of a stiff copper wire and supported the down-lead on two enormous bell insulators as used on telegraph poles. I had to smash a corner of my bedroom window to bring the wire in. I had bought a large knife switch which could be turned over to connect the aerial to ground.
He then passed on to other substances; to oxides and chlorides, and iodides, and salts, and sulphurets, and found them all insulators when solid, and conductors when fused. In all cases, moreover, except one and this exception he thought might be apparent only he found the passage of the current across the fused compound to be accompanied by its decomposition.
When the poles were all ready on each side of the creek, the insulators, or glass knobs, to which the wires were to be attached, were to be fastened to them, a foot or two from the top. This was to be done under Harry's direction, who had studied up the theory of the operation from his books and under Mr. Lyons. But the actual work proved very difficult.
On the 6th of February was commenced the planting along the road to the corral, of posts furnished with glass insulators, and intended to support the wire. A few days after, the wire was extended, ready to produce the electric current at a rate of twenty thousand miles a second.
A woodpecker in my vicinity has drummed for two seasons on a telegraph pole, and he makes the wires and glass insulators ring. Another drums on a thin board on the end of a long grape-arbor, and on still mornings can be heard a long distance. A friend of mine in a Southern city tells me of a red-headed woodpecker that drums upon a lightning-rod on his neighbor's house.
For some minutes the Phoenix investigated, clicking and scraping about, and muttering "Quite so" and "There we are." Then it fluttered down again and rubbed its wings together. "The whole situation up there is a lot simpler than I thought it would be, my boy. The power lines merely come up to the pole on one side, pass through the insulators, and go away from the pole on the other side.
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