The Agitated Elocutionist by Richard Behrens

Author:Richard Behrens [Behrens, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nine Muses Books
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

6. The Electromechanician

Homer Thesinger was called by many in Fall River the “Boy Inventor,” but his preferred term for his chosen profession was Electromechanician, a word he had first seen used in Telegrapher magazine to describe Mr. Thomas Edison, Homer’s most valued role model. He spent his days in his father’s basement on Prospect Street tirelessly tinkering with his electrical and telegraphic apparatus, his endless flywheels, batteries, electromagnets, relays and receivers, determined to be one of the first to make marked improvements in multiplexed signaling. He was regarded by most as intellectually promising but lacking serious prospects when it came to a career.

In the midst of his stubborn and time-consuming work, he often joined Miss Lizzie Borden for some refreshments at the South Main Street Apothecary where he would boast about his own inventions and visions for machines as yet invented. He held a bit of a torch of Lizzie, being that he admired the way her mind sorted out a considerable amount of factual data, always managing to piece together a larger picture that was absurdly obvious once you divined the solution, but which had been doggedly evasive during the crime solving. He felt she accomplished, with the puzzling mysteries brought to her by her clients, what he was attempting to do when he engineered some electromagnetic device: to fit it all together into an elegant and obvious solution. For this reason, his inventive mind and mechanical competence had served her well in more than a few of her detective cases.

So it came as a pleasant surprise one afternoon when Homer received a note by messenger to meet Lizzie at the apothecary on South Main Street and that he should bring his Sazaphone, a complicated contraption of rubber tubing and ear-shaped lozenges that were designed to project voices from one part of a room to another. Homer had invented the device for a school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it had never been used because it had been so effective that members of the rehearsal audience had trembled in fear of the spectral voices that emerged from its cups. The presiding theatrical director finally deemed the device infernal and had banned it from the school grounds.

Homer appeared in the apothecary with his inventor bag slung over his shoulder, the Sazaphone protruding through the burlap like a bunched serpent coiled inside. Lizzie was up on a stool sipping her syrup water and tapping her toes on the cross bar. “Homer,” she said with a sigh. “You have acted promptly. Once again I need you to aid me in my exploits.”

“And what, pray tell, are those?” Homer asked. He was used to Lizzie allowing him only enough information about her proceedings than he needed to know, no more, or less. “I have a meeting of my Fluted Shaft Society at eight tonight,” he explained. “We’re designing a cylinder that will capture the human voice in coded format so it can later be reproduced mechanically. We’re hoping to obtain a patent and make money selling it to industry.

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