The knowledge machine
plucking my arm.

"Mr. Purdy, in confidence, could you give me those courses too?" the judge asked timidly.

Overnight, Electro-Education became the sensation of the country. It was like a bomb going off.

I'll admit that it sort of floored me. I'm a modest kind of a guy. I'd figured on profits, on maybe even a chain of education-shops some day, but I hadn't figured on what EE rapidly became.

It didn't grow—it exploded. Within a month, Carter had branches started or underway in every big city in the country. He'd bought up a factory to turn out the EE apparatus. We trained our own operators. It was simple, since we just ran an EE tape to teach them.

Our advertising plastered the newspapers, the billboards, the radio. We made the whole country EE conscious, overnight. One of our best ads was:

WHY GO TO COLLEGE FOR KNOWLEDGE?

Would You Drive a Horse and Buggy To Work?

GET SMART THE MODERN WAY!

And there was a big billboard picture that showed a guy sitting with one of our EE caps on his head. It advised:

DON'T BE DUMB, CHUM!

Put On Your Learning-Cap Today!

For the classier trade, the advertising men had worked out displays that showed a dumb cluck cringing in the middle of a lot of brilliant-looking conversationalists.

"Do you envy your friends when they discuss learned subjects?" the ad asked. "Why be inferior? EE will make a new man of you mentally."

They poured into our EE shops. They came in such droves that the police had to establish lines at every shop.

Carter and I had big offices down in the Monarch State Building, by now. My work wasn't hard—I arrived at eleven each morning, smoked a cigar, and then went to lunch for a few hours. The afternoon was not quite so tough.

But Carter really worked. I never saw a guy with so much ambition. It kind of scared me, the way he kept EE mushrooming out bigger and bigger each day.

The universities and colleges had gone nuts. They tried first to suppress 
 Prev. P 9/14 next 
Back Top
Privacy Statement Terms of Service Contact