"May the great Maxwell bless me!" Rorschach was back in his dorm at the Tower of Stars, desperately trying to recall the contents of his electrical and electronics courses. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

The Dwarves had already discovered the principle of magnetism producing electricity, but they hadn’t realized the reverse was also true: electricity could produce magnetism. Goes to show how single-minded they could be. Of course, this also meant the Dwarves hadn’t discovered electromagnetic waves.

In the lab, Rorschach explained to everyone that while he was investigating the building’s systems, he noticed that the instruments measuring Ether fluctuations were picking up a set of interference signals. The spectrogram showed anomalous peaks that hadn’t appeared in other experiments within the Tower of Stars, not even in Professor Poincaré’s own lab.

Upon further observation, the anomalous peaks appeared when the generator units in the power room were running, and disappeared when they were shut down.

"Could the Ether generation itself be causing the interference?" Snow cautioned Rorschach against jumping to the conclusion that the generator was the source of the noise.

"But the interference also disappeared when we shut down the generators and switched to the Collectors for the Ether supply."

Only then did Snow concede that Rorschach’s speculation might be correct. Rorschach proposed an experiment to verify his hypothesis and asked the Alchemy Department to prepare the necessary equipment.

That night, Rorschach returned to the Tower of Stars and began designing the experiment. While he couldn’t recall the famous Maxwell’s equations from electromagnetism, he could remember Maxwell’s relations from thermodynamics. But that didn’t stop him from revealing the existence of electromagnetic waves to the others, leaving the task of deriving the formulas to brighter minds.

To prove the existence of electromagnetic waves, the task was to generate them and then detect them. Rorschach "designed" a transmitter and a receiver:

The transmitter was an oscillating circuit made of a helical coil and a tin-plate capacitor. When power was supplied and then abruptly cut, it would generate an alternating current, which would in turn emit electromagnetic waves.

The receiver was a ring-shaped induction coil. When it received electromagnetic waves of a frequency matching or close to its own resonant frequency, a spark would be visible across its terminals.

Both deal with waves. The transmitter could be compared to an electromagnetic "tuning fork," emitting waves at a specific frequency. Unfortunately, the receiver wasn’t as versatile as an eardrum; it needed to be tuned to the transmitter’s specific frequency to be able to pick up the signal.

The next day, Rorschach took his diagrams to the Alchemy Department, who brought materials sufficient to assemble the devices.

"Will it require a lot of power?" the Mages asked, preparing to start the generator.

After getting a no, one of the guys from the Alchemy Department didn’t hesitate. He directly used the Zero Level spell, [Electric Claw], to charge the transmitter’s capacitor. The spell simply electrified his hand; he touched the circuit, and the charge transferred to the capacitor. As he pulled his hand away, he shook it. "A bit tingly..."

SNAP!

Everyone saw it. On the other side, the terminals of the unpowered coil sparked.

"It really works?" The others immediately moved the receiver a bit farther away and repeated the process.

SNAP! Another electric spark flared to life.

But when they moved it to about three meters away, the receiver no longer sparked.

"The effective range is too short!" an instructor from the Artillery Academy said, looking disappointed. He was the one who had proposed the signal beacon system. "A signal beacon tower can transmit up to twenty-four kilometers!" He was clearly proud of his system’s range and didn’t want to see it superseded.

Fortunately, a member of the Alchemy Department who had experience developing the Ether transceivers immediately realized the relationship between transmission distance and frequency. "The signal is attenuating very quickly. Do we need to adjust the transmission frequency?"

’This is where my knowledge falls short...’ Rorschach only knew the frequency band for FM radio was somewhere around 85 MHz. He had no idea how to actually tune the frequency or design the specific components for the transmitter and receiver.

Snow took the lead in the subsequent experiments. He began by systematically testing the properties of the newly discovered waves. He concluded that they behaved similarly to light: they could be blocked, obstructed, reflected, and refracted. By implementing a simple modulation circuit and upgrading the charging method from [Electric Claw] to [Lightning Bolt], they successfully extended the effective range to a hundred meters.

"The advantages are its high speed and wireless transmission," Snow summarized. "The disadvantages are that, much like visible light, the signal disperses, attenuates, and can be blocked by obstacles."

Everyone agreed that the technology had significant flaws. If they had to build a relay station every hundred meters, the cost would be even higher than that of the signal beacon towers.

"Since the signal attenuates so severely in the air, could we give the electromagnetic waves a medium to travel through, like a wire?" Rorschach asked. He was a bit disappointed. He had hoped to unlock the entire radio technology tree in one go, but since he wasn’t an expert or even a radio hobbyist, he had to settle for proposing the concept of a wired telegraph.

"That might just work!" The eyes of the other mages lit up. Conducting electricity would require copper wire, which was far cheaper than the Secret Silver Thread used to transmit Ether.

Of course, there were still voices of doubt. Unlike the Dwarves and Mages, not many engineers were familiar with electricity. After the initial failure with wireless transmission, many were already losing heart.

Another couldn’t understand how it could possibly carry enough information. "If electricity can transmit letters, then we should all listen during a thunderstorm to hear what the gods have to say to us!"

Snow ignored the admittedly clever sarcasm. He and the Mages of the Alchemy Department knew the wired version would work. In his heart, Master Snow was already convinced that wireless should also be possible; it would just require more experimentation and adjustment.

Rorschach sensed that even though this project didn’t involve Magic, there was still a major difference in how ordinary people and Mages approached technology:

To a Caster, who had already mastered the [Communication Skill], even a concept like a "telephone" would be easy to grasp. Making the Artillery Academy instructors understand, however, would be another matter entirely.

A few days later, the newly designed transceivers and a one-kilometer-long cable made their grand debut. It had taken some time to produce the cable. The members of the experiment team gathered in the open space outside the large workshop, stretching the cable out as straight as possible with a group of people at each end.

Rorschach had learned the Small Spell [Electric Claw] in the process. As the one who proposed the idea, he was to be the first telegraph operator.

The Mages didn’t even need any special equipment to send a message. They just needed to touch the end of the wire with an electrified finger, tapping rhythmically. Rorschach tapped out a signal: three short pulses and one long one.

At the other end, the duration of the relay’s corresponding clicks was recorded by the receiving party.

Rorschach tapped out a few more combinations of long and short pulses. When they checked the results, all five tests had been successful.

"What’s the limit? Ten kilometers? Twenty? Or hundreds, even thousands? I think we can start trying to make the longest cable in history!" Snow said with a satisfied smile, after confirming that all the messages had been transmitted flawlessly.

"Either way, I can finally report to Kano with confidence and tell him we didn’t waste all that money for nothing!"

...

That night, Rorschach lay on his dorm bed. On his desk sat an induction coil he had brought back from the lab. He still felt a pang of dissatisfaction that the wireless plan had been shelved.

SNAP!

Rorschach had obtained the "Charge Drive" entry from [Electric Claw]. Using his panel, he combined it with "Frequency Vibration" from the [Communication Skill], effectively turning himself into a human transmitter. Now, lying in bed, he rhythmically emitted electromagnetic waves, making the coil on his desk crackle.

’Electricity produces magnetism...’ Rorschach suddenly realized. ’Could I cosplay as Magneto?’