Cy Hains's Sermo-Phone and Other Stories

Curious scientific tall tales of Maine inventors and eccentrics, mixing the art of the yarn with the developing genre of science fiction. Taylor, a Maine writer for various local-interest periodicals, presents a miscellany of speculative inventions and regional whimsy: most notably, a doctor sets up a carrier pigeon messaging relay to bring down the exploitative phone company, in "Dr Lunt and His Telebird System"; and a lazy farmer invents an electrical contraption to secretly broadcast Sunday sermons directly into his private home, in the title story. A rare and intriguing amateur exploration of turn-of-the-century technologies in the traditional tall-tale format, wherein the canny old Maine farmer fulfills his trickster function through the use of wires, tubes, levers, and transmitters.