The Master Key

Abstract

The protagonist is a boy named Rob Joslyn. His age is not specified. Rob is an electrical experimenter whose father encourages him and sees that he "never lacked batteries, motors or supplies of any sort." A "net-work of wires soon ran throughout the house". He loses track of the elaborately interconnected wires, and trying to get a cardboard house to light up, he "experimented in a rather haphazard fashion, connecting this and that wire blindly and by guesswork, in the hope that he would strike the right combination." There is a bright flash, and a being who calls himself the Daemon of Electricity appears. Rob is given new discoveries like a silver box of food tablets, each one of which provides sufficient nourishment for a whole day, a "small tube" which can direct "an electric current" at a foe, rendering him unconscious for the period of one hour and others.