Page:Amazing Stories Volume 01 Number 04.djvu/32

320 As an inventor Mr. Fosdick had achieved great success. True, his patent corkscrew had never drawn a cork, but it had made a fair hairpin, and he had disposed of it as such for a dignified sum. His patent pump refused flatly to perform the duty for which it had been designed, but it turned out to be an excellent churn and the favorite creature of his inventive brain, his patent curling iron, was in service in countless homes throughout the broad land as a nut-cracker.

S Mr. Fosdick gazed abstractedly at the bare wall in front of him he beetled his brows after the manner of all geniuses when concentrating their minds upon some great and suddenly discovered phenomenon in the wonderful world of science. As stated before, Mr. Fosdick was thinking. And the thing that immersed him so deep in thought was a sentence that he had just read in the book. Many would have passed it by, but Mr. Fosdick's eyes had no sooner fallen on the lines of type—less than a score of words in all—than it immediately revealed to him a wide field of experimental research and one replete with thrilling possibilities. The momentous truth as told in the single, short and unobtrusive sentence was: "Static electricity may be generated by rubbing together such substances as resin and fur." Little did Mr. Fosdick at the time suspect that his stumbling upon this bit of elementary science was to result in focusing upon him the fierce limelight of international publicity and to make Whiffleville, for a brief forty-eight hours, the breathless topic of conversation throughout the civilized world.

Fully an hour passed. The noon whistle blew at Eben Stetzle's chop mill announcing to all Whiffleville the arrival of the dinner hour, and then Mr. Fosdick with the sigh of a tired man arose from his chair and started to close the shop. Had he followed out his intention this story would never have been written; but just as he was about to lock the front door there happened one of those strange and inexplicable things that so often change the destiny of men and nations—a large black cat walked across the threshold and sniffed rather contemptuously at Mr. Fosdick's shins!

Mr. Fosdick stared at the cat for a full minute and then he slowly put the key back in his pocket. "It's John L.!" he exclaimed. "By thunder, I'll try it!"

Pulling out a drawer of the workbench he, after fumbling about in a bushel or so of wheels, springs, screw-eyes and other odds and ends so dear to the hearts of all geniuses, eventually drew forth a large chunk of resin. And then picking up the unsuspecting John L.—so named after a highly successful pugilist on account of his extremely belligerent disposition—he placed the cat upon the bench and began to gently stroke him, fore and aft with the resin. Slowly the hair upon the cat's back began to rise and in a few minutes John L. had apparently grown to twice his normal size. No astronomer discovering some hitherto unknown planet—no mother gazing with loving eyes, at her first born, ever experienced the rapturous tumult of feelings that suffused Mr. Fosdick as he watched the rapidly expanding John L. Quickly wrapping a piece of copper wire around a water pipe, Mr. Fosdick with eyes burning with the excitement of the experiment, slowly pushed the other end of the wire in the direction of John L.'s nose. Suddenly and without warning there was a loud cracking sound, a hot blue flame shot out from the cat's nose to the end of the wire, and John L., with a -wild cry of rage, leaped some dozen feet in the air, and coming down, executed a neat right and left scratch upon the inventor's face; then with a single bound sprang through the door.

"By Jinks!" cried Fosdick. "She works—she works—she works!"

ESS than a week after Mr. Fosdick had made his experiment, all Whiffleville was thrown into a turmoil of excitement by the erection of a mysterious crib-like structure back of his tinshop. Only a chosen few knew the purpose of the strange building, and they, Eben Stetzle and five other friends and admirers of Mr. Fosdick, maintained a sphynx-like silence. In fact these men, having paid in ten dollars apiece to Mr. Fosdick, constituted the stockholders and the first board of directors of The Feline Light and Power Co.

The plan of organization was broad and comprehensive. The Feline Light and Power Co. was to be the parent company. Mr. Fosdick assured the directors that it should, by virtue of the ownership of basic patents which he was sure to obtain, control all the other companies that would spring up throughout the country, just as soon as the parent company had demonstrated the success of the new method of power generation.

Briefly, the new power plant consisted of a room hardly larger than a piano box elevated some three feet from the ground by insulating pillars of glazed brick. The floor and the walls of the room were coated with a four-inch lining of pure resin. Into this room a "plurality of cats," so the patent application read, "were to be liberated therein by dropping them through the trap door (A) to the resin-covered floor (B) upon which surface they will conduct themselves in the manner hereinafter described." The prospectus which Mr. Fosdick had already started to work upon told in simpler language that the friction of the cats against the surface of the resin would generate electricity, which would be conveyed to consumers within a radius of ten miles—and possibly to the street railway and light stations in the city, fifty miles distant. Eben Stetzle was the first to foresee that there would be an immediate market for cats and secretly he and his brother-in-law set about organizing a cat-breeding corporation under the laws of New Jersey to be known as "The General Feline Co., Limited."

T took some pretty hard hustling upon the part of the directorate, but by the time the power house was completed twenty "units," as Mr. Fosdick called them, had been lured from as many back yards and for a day languished in the back room of the tinshop. In the evening, when night 