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A Man Who Built A Set He Has Never Seen
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to the rescue, and become ever so much more acute. And, too, the loss of sight stimulates caution, easiness, patience — never a loss without some gain. Instead of the eye observing a panorama of things, a man's reason becomes better developed, and his nervous energy greatly conserved. Of course, the loss of sight is a great handicap, but I soon became accustomed to it. It wasn't long before I was taking long hikes to Westchester, wrestling with the boys, swimming, fishing, and otherwise enjoying myself in the sunshine and air. Several years after this handicap came upon me, I married, and my wife and children became the joy of my life.
" When did you become interested in radio?"the writer asked.
"Just about a year ago. Contrary to the custom of many blind folks who become more or less clannish and stay by themselves, I have always mingled with people who read the topics of the day. Or sometimes friends drop in with a few cigars and try to tease me. 'What kind of a cigar is this?' they will ask, just to see if 1 can tell by the aroma. Or else they will drop in to tell me what is going on at the club. On one of these occasions a friend told me about the development of radio, and related someof the wonderful things that could betaken1 out of the air — concerts, lectures, travel talks, stories, baseball scores, and code. And then my boy read from the newspapers what was going on in that line. I didn't know very much about how the thing worked, but the thought of listening to good music and the possible educational value of the lectures proved entirely too much for me, and I determined to find out something about this thing and to build myself a set.
"In my early days I had studied telegraphy and of course became familiar with batteries,
OPERATING THE SET HE MADE HIMSELF Mr. O'Keefe, lost his sight twenty-four years ago. "No one knows the amount of good I get out of this little set," he says, "and no one can know but myself, for it is like an emotion — very hard to explain"
circuits and that sort of thing. And I understood a good deal about the telephone. So it came down to the point of cost and actual construction. Naturally, in my circumstances I had to confine myself to a crystal set, and I like the crystal very much. My boy read to me -how to make the primary and secondary coils, how to mount the slide tuner, how to connect the crystal, coil, condenser, and phones in the circuit, and gradually 1 began to visualize in my mind just how the thing could be done.
"Visualization is half the battle. Also I began to comprehend inductance and capacity and to see why different taps had to be taken from the secondary in order to tune in on different wavelengths. And then came the condenser, detector, phones, and aerial — all this I got firmly in my mind and then proceeded to make a loose-coupler type of set.