Q U O D • E R A T
D E M O N S T R A N D U M
D E M O N S T R A N D U M
Frost 76, 121 Age of Steel
Days turned to weeks as Anton labored away within the lab, hoping that his idiosyncratic approach was seemed as undergraduate bumbling at worst or inspired genius at best. He had at least won some trust by refining their mathematical models earlier in the season, and with his formal role being to record data on the receiving airship he found himself with a great deal of time - as well as ample exposure to what the antenna actually picked up as useful information. That information in mind, the task before him became that of trial and error, a running attempt to.... somehow modify the transmitter to only broadcast what was actually received at the destination.
This proved easier than expected, at least in the attempting. The lab had all manner of spare equipment and no one questioned a researcher taking one to conduct their own experiments. Without the massive overhead, and danger, of something like the arc furnace, protocols were considerably laxer than what Anton had grown accustomed to, and he found himself somewhat surprised when no one cared after he took odds and ends. Running current through the makeshift devices over and over again, slowly but surely he began to narrow down the solution.
He started with well known, pre-built, components. Hooking them up in a jury-rigged fashion to power sources on one end and an antenna at the other, his first attempts consisted of simply letting the electricity flow and comparing the aura of the output to that which he had studiously memorized and cultivated in his mind's eye. There was little else that would work in the end, even if Anton had been a masterful physicist he would've ended up doing much the same - just with the mathematical representations of what he could instead see with his Rune. That fact helped him somewhat with the cognitive dissonance of using magic in such a zealously anti-mage environment. After all, it wasn't like he was getting different answers than a 'real' scientist would, he was just taking a shortcut that they had denied to themselves, a refusal to use empirical truths about the world that was something like tying a hand behind their backs and then using the other to hold a misshapen weight.
A cavalcade of malformed symphonies followed as he attempted to modify the radio waves to something less odious and more refined, each attempt succeeding in at least not giving Anton the same headache that the original broadcast did. There was little progress made on the actual goal however, no matter what circuit he welded to the transmitter there was little actual control over the resulting waves, no way to fine tune or hold them within a certain band.
In desperation, Anton turned to the two weapons of last resort in any experimentalist's arsenal. Random guessing, and actually reading. His fluency in Kathalan came in handy for the latter maneuver, the lordling able to parse the technical language of the foreign documents far better than most of his peers. Oh, true, it was the de facto language of scientific discourse, but the hyper specific terms and concepts relayed in the Imperial texts required a level of fluency and understanding that was not easily reached by men who were exposed to the other language only in classrooms and when reading textbooks.
The papers were... less than helpful. Electricity as a science had been somewhat left to the wayside by the Imperium, an interesting curiosity good for powering lights but best kept in reserve as a secondary power source when aether failed. Zaichaer, naturally, had other considerations, and the City of Brass was attempting to use the phenomena in ways that their Gelerian cousins would have never bothered to. But still, there were some useful odds and ends, ideas to experiment with that he would have otherwise not tried. The most fruitful of these was actually a combination of two devices.
A so-called resonant circuit was little more than a toy in the Imperial literature, an intellectual curiosity to tame electricity at will. No practical use for it had ever been found, but now Anton wondered if he had found one where an Academy scholar had shrugged their shoulders and given up on a practical implementation. While they had none within the lab, they did have both of the component parts, and of course a surfeit of the required copper wiring.
Indeed, the first of the two major components was little more than wire itself, albeit coated in shielding and then wrapped into a coil. This was referred to as an inductor, and served to stabilize the current, preventing outside interference from modifying after the signal had been stabilized. The second was nothing more than a capacitor, a relatively simple device that even Zaichaer had been using for decades. Designed to store electrical charge, they had been some of the first experimental devices ever constructed, and it was not an exaggeration to say that without having achieved a working understanding them that the city would have never been able to electrify at all. Small versions of the type Anton called for were wondrously primitive, resembling more alchemy than science, composed only of a glass jar with conductive foil coating both the inside and outside. With a non-conductive top, and the foil kept away from touching it, a metal rod could then be inserted and a current from a power source run through it. Equal and opposite forces then charged the inner and outer foils, permitting it to maintain charge when not connected to a broader circuit.
With inductor and capacitor created, and resonant circuit in hand, there was little left to do besides attach it to the test assembly he had produced. While on its own the circuit did as desired, it required fine-tuning, work that predominantly consisted once more of trial and error. Tuning the resonance circuit was a matter of modifying the inductance and capacitance of the system, the former being the easier of the two. By modifying the coiled wires, be it by inserting a rod in between them, increasing the spacing between the coils, or changing the shielding material the wires were coated in, the value could be modified, altering the entire song that the device sung. After days of tweaking, he had at last built a prototype that would actually work. Already it possessed a far greater range and vastly increased clarity, but it still suffered a fatal flaw.
Anton had no way of convincing the others to go along with his plan. Not yet, at least. The only weapon in his arsenal was the same that he had been left with when working directly for Professor Haber, a tool that by necessity he had begun to achieve some skill in. Mathematics.
The purity of equation was the only route by which he could tell the others that he had mastered the problem without rousing suspicion. He was known for intuitive flashes of insight from his earlier work, but such a reputation was not enough on its own for the changes to the circuit diagram he was suggesting to be put into practice. He needed proof, and a story to explain how he had arrived at that proof. The latter at least was handily taken care of by the same Kathalan texts that Anton had earlier relied upon, the student already concocting a tail of having been inspired by what he had read about the circuit. Aside from that, his only real solution was to work away at the equations, his frustration growing at the same pace as his skill with the advanced formulas.
It helped that once again he was working backwards, the mage having already determined the answer and now seeking only to determine the question that it met. Doubly so that sloppiness in his figures wouldn't just be forgiven, but might even make the story he gave more believable. Starting first with the descriptive equations of the resonant circuit, he was then able to describe the effects of the device upon a current that had been bridged over a spark - or in other words, a radio wave. The wire still contained the signal, it was just stored and massaged until instead of being the broadband abomination he had first seen it was refined into a single, coherent message.
When his colleagues read his idea and equations over and agreed to put the idea into practice, Anton gave a sigh of relief. It was only exceeded by the one he gave when the experiment with his design began in earnest, and instead of the cacophonous hell that he had first heard, there was a single sonorous tone, interrupted only by the dead air necessary to make dots and dashes at the receiver station. Once again, it had worked, and once again Anton was left with feeling of discomfort as he was feted as the man of the hour, a burgeoning superstar within the Hall of Inventors. Even if he felt like telling his peers the truth about himself, by this point he no longer had the emotional or mental strength to do so.
Still, he could not deny what he had achieved, and a small smile of triumph nonetheless lit his face.