Appleton, Victor – Tom Swift Jr 20 – And His Megascope Space Prober

Arv Hanson looked puzzled when Tom called the setup an “anti-inverse-square-wave generator.” “Say that again,” he murmured, frowning.

Tom grinned. “Well, you’ve heard of the inverse-square law,” he began. “It says that the strength of a signal is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from its source.”

Using chalk and a blackboard, Tom dashed off a simple example. “If twenty units of light are received two feet away from an electric bulb, then only five units will be received at a distance of four feet,” Tom explained.

“That’s because light and other forms of energy travel in spreading waves so that you pick up only a smaller and smaller bit of the signal the farther away you are,” Tom went on. “But I call my generator an anŁz-inverse-square type because the signal doesn’t get weaker. It stays focused in a constant beam.”

Hank Sterling rubbed his jaw dubiously. “Neat trick,” he said, “but how do you do it?”

“Watch.” Tom opened a window and aimed his

46 MEGASCOPE SPACE PROBER

antenna, by means of a computer device, toward a hill just visible on the horizon. “I have a receiver hookup on that hill,” Tom explained. “The strength of the signal it picks up will be telemetered back to us here in the lab.”

After tuning his equipment, Tom flicked a switch, and a meter on his control panel registered the strength of the transmitted signal. A needle on a twin meter swung to the same wattage, showing that the hillside receiver had picked up the signal full strength.

Both Hank and Arv were amazed, although they found it somewhat difficult to follow fully the complicated wave analysis which Tom wrote down to explain how he had accomplished the phenomenon. The drawings and data which the young inventor gave them for his full-scale generator, however, were routine engineering.