or back of your house to the barn or the garage, and then have it go
up as high as it can go. The upper end doesn't have to be in the outer
air, for the sound will come along it if it's in the attic. Still it's
better to have it outside if possible. The lower end of the wire has
to be connected with the ground in some way, and you can fix that
by attaching it to a water pipe or any other pipe that runs into the
ground. A good way is to let it down the side of the house and put
it through the cellar window and fasten it to a pipe.

"After you have your aerial you want to get the rest of the apparatus
together. The first thing to do is to get a baseboard which will serve
as the bottom of the receiving box. Something like this," and he put
his hand on a board about eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide,
and about an inch thick. "This is the platform, as it were, on which
the different parts of the apparatus are to rest.

"Now since your ear alone can't detect the waves that are coming to
and along your aerial, you have to have a sort of electrical ear that
will do this for you. Here it is," and he picked up a piece of crystal
and a wire of phosphor bronze. "When this wire comes in contact with
this bit of crystal the mysterious waves become audible vibrations.

"But this isn't enough. You've got to get in tune with the sending
station in order to understand the sounds you hear. When your
vibration frequency is the same as that from which the message is
sent, you can hear as clearly as though the voice or instrument were
in the next room. Now here's a piece of a curtain pole that's about
a foot and a half long. You see that I've wound around its entire
length, except for about a half inch at either end, a coil of wire.
This is called the inductance coil. You will notice that the wire is