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night thinking about it. If a fellow could make a piece of black iron into red iron, or even white iron, just by heating it until the heat waves became visible as color waves, then why couldn't a fellow make some sort of device for changing any kind of color waves into some other kind of color waves? And by reasoning backward, what was it in Bob's machine that picked up the color waves and changed them so they were just black and white? Of course, I knew the reason that color waves striking a sensitized film or plate were recorded in black and white was because the chemicals on the film were that kind, and could only turn black and not into colors. But Bob's arrangement wasn't like that. It wasn't a chemical thing like a plate, but the real thing shown on a screen. That is, the original rays—all in colors— were picked up and transformed to radio waves and then picked up by the receiver and changed back to light-waves.
    But somewhere in the process they must have been changed, because when they were changed back from radio-waves to light-waves they'd lost all the variations that meant color. That was what I kept thinking all night. It was just as if the picture had been viewed through some sort of screen that cut out the color effect. You know how, when you look through a smoked glass, the colors sort of disappear, and if you look through a green or red glass how some colors look black and others gray and you lose the color values. Well, the effect of Bob's machine was like that. Only, of course, there wasn't any red or green or smoked effect so far as you could see.
    Then I began to think about the effect of color-screens used in taking pictures and how a yellow screen cut out the blue light and brought out color value on the plate, and I began to wonder if Bob couldn't rig up some sort of screen in front of his machine and solve the problem. I guess I went to sleep then, for the next thing I knew it was daylight. Well, I lay there in bed a while thinking over all I'd thought about in the night, and I noticed a ray of sunshine shining in through a chink in the shade and striking on my bed. All of a sudden I got interested. The ray of light looked yellow all right, but where it hit the sheet it made a blue patch. Gosh, I thought to myself, that's funny. What's changed that light ray to a blue ray? Well, of course, it was as simple as two and two. The light was reflected from the edge of a glass on my dresser, but the glass was red, not blue, and it took me a long time to figure out how the blue rays were bent off and hit the bed while the red rays were shot through the glass.
    I couldn't see that it had anything to do with Bob's puzzle though, but when I told Bob about all I'd been thinking about and the sunlight and everything he jumped up in the air and yelled.
    "Hurrah!" he shouted. "You're the right man in the right place, Jimmy! I believe you've struck the nail on the head."
    I told him I didn't see how, and asked him to explain. Well, the way he explained it was this. What he needed was a light ray of some sort. In transforming lightwaves to radio-waves, they lost their relative lengths and all had the same length, so they became white light-waves. Then he went into a long rigamarole about infra-red rays and X-rays, and so on, that I couldn't follow, but the upshot of it was that there must be something in existence that we didn't see and didn't know about that controlled the light-waves' lengths, but was lost when they were changed to radio-waves. And he felt cocksure that it was some sort of wave or ray. Well, he spent about ten days reading everything he could find on rays and he, filled up a dozen notebooks with notes on chemical-rays, and death-rays and poison-rays and every kind of ray, real or imaginary, that had ever been invented or made or discovered or faked. He was just ray-crazy, and he spent all the money he had—which wasn't such a lot at that—on apparatus and chemicals and what not. And the things