Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/30

 at one end, thirty feet high at the other end and fifty feet long—a very respectable aerial.

We ran the leading in wire to the window of my printing office. Outside the window frame we screwed a lightning switch. Next we fastened the rat-tail of the aerial to one of the middle posts, and from the other lower post we ran a wire down to the ground and into the basement, where we clamped it on to the water pipe, and this made the ground. This done we connected the other end of the switch with a wire and ran it through an insulator in the window sash so that it could be fixed to the instruments when I got them.

“Won’t those wires attract the lightning, Jack?” my mother asked, eyeing it dubiously after the aerial was all up.

I was just about to tell her I had never thought of that, when Bob jumped in and explained it all as intelligently as though he were lecturing on wireless before the Royal Society.

“You see, Mrs. Heaton,” he began, “an aerial when it is properly put up like this one really protects a house from lightning just as a lightning rod does, only better. Before a