He also devised a simple apparatus to detect the presence of these waves—that is, to receive them, which he called a resonator, and this was a cut wire ring with a little brass ball on each of its ends as shown in the following diagram. Now when Hertz set his induction coil going, streams of sparks were set up in the spark-gap of the oscillator and electric oscillations, or high-frequency currents, surged from one of the copper plates to the other and back again, and these sent out trains of electric waves through the ether.
By holding his resonator, or as we would call it now, his detector, at a little distance from his sending apparatus, when the latter sent out the electric waves they would set up electric oscillations, or currents of high frequency, in the ring detector and these in turn would make a stream of little sparks jump across the gap between the balls.
Here, then, was a complete wireless sending and receiving apparatus, but it would work only a short distance, probably not over 100 feet. But Hertz was not trying to invent a wireless telegraph; all he wanted to and did do was to prove that there were long electric waves and there his work ended.
After Hertz had shown how long electric waves could be set up by the sparks of an induction coil, other scientific chaps went to work to get up a better scheme to detect them. In 1890 Edouard Branly, of France, discovered that when metal filings were put in a tube and electric waves were allowed to fall on them the resistance of the filings was lowered, and Sir Oliver Lodge, in 1894, found that this was caused by the filings being drawn closer together, that is, they cohered. By connecting a coherer (see the diagram) as he called the filings detector, to a galvanometer and a dry-cell he was able to detect the presence of electric waves up to distances of 500 feet.
A year later Popoff, of Russia, made a receiver for studying electric storms—lightning is only gigantic electric sparks—and this consisted of a coherer, a battery, a relay and an electric bell. Popoff connected one side of the coherer with a wire which he ran up into the air, or aerial wire as we call it now, and the other side of the coherer he grounded, as shown in the diagram. This was the first time that an aerial wire and a ground had ever been used in connection with a coherer. With this apparatus Popoff was able to hear the coming of storms for hours before they appeared above the horizon.
About this time Guglielmo Marconi, who was only 20 years old, was going to the University at Bologna, Italy. Prof. Righi who lectured on physics there was repeating Hertz’s experiments and used Branly’s coherer for detecting the electric waves. This set Marconi to thinking and it was not long before he had an experimental wireless set of his own, thus becoming the first wireless kid.
The chief difference between his transmitter and that of Hertz was a telegraph key which he put in the battery circuit so that he could break up the sparks into dots and dashes. He also set a reflector back of the apparatus to concentrate the electric waves into a beam to make them go in a given direction when they would be more powerful and cover a longer distance. But Hertz did the reflector stunt first.
Marconi’s receiver was made up of an apparatus just like Popoff’s except that he connected an old-time Morse printing register in the battery circuit so that when the electric waves acted on the coherer the signals would be printed on a tape in dots and dashes.
In his first attempts, then, to send wireless messages, young Marconi had done four things and these were (1) to see the possibilities of using electric waves set up by a Hertz apparatus for sending messages; (2) to put a telegraph key in the sending circuit; (3) to use a Popoff receiver for receiving the electric waves, and (4) to put a Morse register in the receiving circuit. These were the first big steps in building up a wireless telegraph set, but none of them formed an invention.
I do not know just when Marconi added the aerial and ground to his transmitter—Popoff had used an aerial and ground with his receiver—but the aerial and ground formed his great claim to being the inventor of the wireless telegraph, for it was the aerial and ground which enabled him to cover long distances.
In 1896 Marconi went to England and there applied for a patent in which he showed an aerial and ground connected to his sending and receiving apparatus (see the diagram) but even at this time he did not understand the importance of a high, well insulated aerial and a good ground.
On arriving in London this boy, with the big idea in the back of his head and a lot of business ability in front of it, went to Sir William Pierce who was then at the head of the British Post Office and offered to give him a demonstration of his new wireless telegraph. As Sir William had long been interested in the possibility of wireless telegraphy he was agreeable. The outcome of it was that one station was rigged up in the General Post Office and another on the Thames embankment about 300 feet away.
These experiments were successful enough to interest the War Office and he was asked to show what he could do over longer distances. Salisbury Plain was chosen for the trials and by placing reflectors back of the sending and receiving apparatus he was able to telegraph over a distance of about 2 miles.
Marconi now commenced to experiment with aerials and grounds in order to increase the effective range of his apparatus and with them he was able to cover the distance of 3 miles between Lowernock and Flat Holm. Sometimes in these trials the dots and dashes would be printed good and clear and at others they were all jumbled up.
The inventor was trying all sorts of schemes to get satisfactory results, but nothing helped until he heightened the aerial wire on his sending apparatus. Presto! the signals came in clear and without a miss. Here then was the whole secret of wireless telegraphy—the higher the aerial the farther messages could be sent with the same amount of power.
This was the real beginning of wireless telegraphy and from that moment on Marconi’s star began to rise. It was not long before he was telegraphing over a space of eight miles, the aerials at both ends being held up in the air by kites.
These astounding results had reached the ears of German scientists and through the pull of the former German Emperor, now plain Mr. Hohenzollern, things were fixed so that Dr. Adolph Slaby, of the Charlottenburg University, was allowed to be present while Marconi was sending and receiving messages.
The learned doctor deliberately swiped Marconi’s ideas and on returning to the land of kultur he bent his energies toward outdoing and undoing the young inventor who showed him how to telegraph without wires. Of course, Dr. Slaby invented a system of wireless telegraphy and this was quickly used on the ships of what was formerly the German Navy.
But Marconi’s fame as the real inventor of the wireless telegraph had too sound a bottom for his detractors to hurt him much and he went right on about his work without the slightest caring whatever. He was next invited by the King of Italy to visit his native land and to make some experiments there. A shore station had been put up at Spezia and a couple of war ships were fitted with wireless equipments. In the tests which followed Marconi broke the record for wireless and his achievement was the talk of the world.
Wireless, like its inventor, was on the upgrade and in England Marconi’s Wireless Telegraphy Company, Limited, as it was at first called, was organized for the purpose of installing his system on ship and shore stations. Stations at Bournemouth and at Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight, about 14 miles apart were put up and Marconi did a great deal of experimenting and increased his range to 18 miles when he sent to and received messages from an out-bound steamer.
No one could shut his eyes to the value of wireless at sea and Lloyd’s, the great shipping corporation, had two stations put up at Ballycastle and Rathlin Island on the northern coast of Ireland where experiments were conducted to further test the reliability of the system in all weathers.
The Kingston Regatta was the next event in which wireless figured and the Daily Express of Dublin arranged with Marconi, or his company, to install his apparatus on a ship and report the races to the shore station for the benefit of their readers; and this was done without a hitch. Talk about a scoop! Here was a wireless scoop. Can you beat it!
About this time the Prince of Wales, afterward King Edward VII, met with an accident and he went aboard the royal yacht Osborne to recuperate. Could Marconi fit up a station on it and also in the royal residence Osborne where Queen Victoria was staying so that communication might be kept up between them? Of course he could and he did it with much satisfaction and pleasure to his royal patrons and credit to himself.
The next installations of note were made by the Marconi Company at South Foreland Lighthouse and East Goodwin Lightship which lay off the Goodwin Shoals about a dozen miles away. This was in December, 1898, and very shortly after a steamer was stranded on the shoals. A C Q D signal was instantly flashed from the lightship to the lighthouse and brought help that saved the ship with its cargo which together were worth a quarter of a million dollars.
Bigger things were now in order and greater distances were to be spanned. Early in 1899 Marconi set up a station at Dover on the English coast and another at Wimereaux on the French coast. The distance between these stations was 30 miles but Marconi had no trouble in sending messages forth and back across the English Channel.
This astounding feat made the British Admiralty sit up and scan the horizon and seeing wireless writ large upon it, it had Marconi put his outfits on three cruisers that very year. During the naval manœuvers which soon took place wireless as a factor in fighting was given a thorough tryout with the result that the top-notch distance was reached when the flagship of the fleet signaled orders to one of the cruisers at a distance of 85 miles.
I remember distinctly how every one over here was talking about that wonderful wireless and the boy who invented it. Consequently when the New York Herald announced that it had engaged Marconi to report the International Yacht Race at New York, the one word on everybody’s tongue was wireless. A ship fitted with wireless that followed in the wake of the yacht, and a shore station was used as in the Kingston Regatta. Over 4,000 words were transmitted from the wireless ship to the shore station where they were retransmitted by wire to the Herald office in New York.
The Marconi interests got busy on this side of the big wet and organized a company to carry on the business over here. Stations were put up in 1901 at different points on the Atlantic coast and also in England. The British Marconi Company entered into an agreement with Lloyd’s in which the latter agreed to use only the Marconi system for a term of 14 years and that ships fitted with Marconi apparatus should not exchange messages with ships carrying any other make of apparatus. Then began the great business of installing Marconi apparatus on the fleets of transatlantic shipping routes. Still Marconi wasn’t satisfied; he wanted to and did do bigger things.
I hadn’t been home from South America more than a fortnight when it just so happened that I listened-in (without a receiver and quite unintentionally I assure you) to a conversation between two officials of a certain wireless company. The message I got was that Marconi was on his way to St. Johns, Newfoundland, with a couple of assistants and that his purpose was to find out how far he could receive messages from passing steamers.
My subconscious self immediately wirelessed to my conscious self that it would be a fitting piece of business for me to work under the great inventor—though he was not much older than I, I knew perfectly well that there was no use trying to get a job with him through the ordinary channels for he had brought his own assistants from England with him and, of course, none others were wanted.
Therefore, I said nothing to any one but quietly hopped on a train for St. Johns, and trusted to luck for the rest. Did you ever notice, Mr. Collins, that when you make up your mind to do a certain thing and you try as hard as you can to do it, good luck generally meets you somewhere along the road and gives you a lift?
Well, when I got to St. Johns, it was the 3rd of December, 1901. I went into a second hand store and bought an outfit of clothes so that I would look like the rest of the working people up there; and when I put them on I flattered myself that I did; my face and hands tanned in the tropics helping out quite some.
I learned that Marconi and his assistants had not arrived nor had any one heard that they were to come. I figured it out that their coming was either a secret or a hoax—in fact, I was inclined to the latter belief; and I had great fears I was on a wild-goose chase and that I had spent about half a million of my hard-earned Brazilian reis for nothing. I stuck around though, and on the 6th who should come to town but the inventor of the wireless telegraph, though to look at him you would not have suspected it. I did not make known to his assistants that I was an operator but when the boxes and hamper which contained his instruments were unloaded I jumped in and helped to put them on the wagon.
Mr. Marconi—now that I had seen him he was Mr.—and one of his assistants left and the other remained behind to look after the bags and baggage. He thought I was the helper of the driver of the dray and the driver thought I was one of the assistants—or at least that’s what I thought they thought. At any rate when we got the dray loaded I just naturally jumped on and went with them.
Mr. Kemp, the assistant, instructed the driver to go to Signal Hill, which is about half-a-mile from St. Johns and right at the mouth of the harbor. When we got there I was nearly frozen but I buckled right down and helped the drayman to unload the stuff and to carry it into the barracks. When he had been paid and was ready to go I said to the driver, “guess I’ll stay and help around,” and when he said “all right,” I knew that matters were pretty well fixed. From that time on I made myself generally useful as a first class roustabout.
While Mr. Kemp and I were busy unpacking the apparatus, kites and balloons, Mr. Marconi and Mr. Paget came in. The inventor wore a fur cap and a fur trimmed overcoat. He took these off, just like a common everyday man, and stood by for a moment looking on. He didn’t say anything and you can bet your last Brazilian reis that I kept my mouth shut. Now and then, though, I took a good look at him for he was, indeed, no lesser personage than the great inventor of the wireless telegraph—Guglielmo Marconi!
He was then 27 years old but he looked at least ten years older. His father was an Italian and his mother was Irish, but Mr. Marconi, except for his bluish eyes and rather light hair, looked strictly like a son of sunny Italy. He had a high forehead, long and rather thin nose, largish ears, a big mouth with a long upper lip which was covered with a straggly mustache, a strong chin and deep-set, serious eyes that seemed to be looking beyond whatever he was looking at.
Certainly he was not an inventor of the old school for he was well groomed and dressed in an up-to-date business suit. One thing sure he was not much of a talker and I soon observed that his great part in the game of wireless was a thinking part.
His assistants set up a little apparatus which consisted of a receiver only with a telephone receiver hooked up to it instead of the usual Morse register. The aerial wire was led outside through a hard rubber insulator in the window where it was fixed to but insulated from a stout pole, set in the ground. To the free end of this leading in wire the aerial wire proper, when it was held aloft by a kite or a balloon, was to be secured.
As his assistants—Mr. Marconi always addressed them as Mr. Kemp and Mr. Paget—were connecting up the instruments there was small show of emotion though I could feel the high tension they were under and shared it with them. Finally the apparatus was connected up and Mr. Marconi tested out the adjustments.
Next we got out several big, nine-foot, hexagon-shaped kites whose ribs were of bamboo and which were covered with silk soaked in dope to make it waterproof. These we put together and then from the wicker hamper we took a couple of small silk balloons and filled them with hydrogen gas from cylindrical steel tanks in which it was compressed.
At last on Tuesday, December 9th, we were all ready to hoist the aerial wire with either a kite or a balloon, but the wind was still high and a small blizzard was on. Mr. Marconi did not think it advisable to try to make any tests then, and if we were disappointed what must he have been. The next day the wind was still blowing strong but we were all anxious to get to work.
“You may try putting up a kite when you are ready, Mr. Kemp,” Mr. Marconi said.
Mr. Kemp was soon ready and with the help of a couple of natives—I was one of them—he got the kite aloft. We used a stranded copper wire for the kite string and this was also to serve for the aerial, but the moment we had it well up a gust of wind hit the kite, the wire parted and—we were ready to try again.
Mr. Marconi then suggested that we try one of the balloons. We took it outside, fastened the aerial wire to it and, different from the kite, we had no trouble in getting it to go up. No sooner had we let out all the wire than it snapped again and the balloon sailed out to sea.
The next day the wind was just as high but we stuck to the barracks in case it should go down. There were bits of talk among Mr. Marconi and his assistants about the instruments, the ground, the aerial and other things which would have been as Greek to any one but an old operator like myself. I drank in every word that these pioneer wireless men said but never a word said I. Once Mr. Paget asked me to hand him a dry-cell and I handed him a binding post instead. Some one said “stupid” under his breath but still loud enough for me to hear it and I was happy. None of this wireless kid stuff here. I was getting away with murder.
Mr. Paget looked at his watch. “Poldhu is sending now. Too bad we haven’t a kite up, Mr. Marconi.”
“We must get it up. Mr. Kemp, will you be good enough to try again?” Mr. Marconi said.
Oh-ho, said I to myself. I am in on big doings. What Mr. Marconi is here for is not particularly to get signals from passing ships far out at sea, but to try and get Poldhu! It made my hair stand on end at the thought of such wonders. And if he gets it he will have spanned the Atlantic—over 2,000 miles—with his wireless waves. He will have done the biggest scientific thing since Cyrus Field joined the old and the new worlds with his cable! Whoopee! Yow! Yow!
From that moment on I was walking on air. The inventor, whatever he may have felt, was calm, cool and collected, dignified at all times but always in a good humor. The strain he was undergoing must have been tremendous, but he had trained himself well in the art of restraint and no one, not in on the know would have ever suspected it.
At Poldhu, on the Cornish coast of England, the Marconi Company had built, for the express purpose of making this greatest of all experiments, the most powerful wireless station that had yet been put up. It had been figured by Marconi and his technical adviser of England, Dr. Fleming, that to transmit wireless messages across the ocean, 15 vertical wires 210 feet high, would have to be used and that these would have to be energized by oscillating currents equal to about 25 horse power. It was indeed a veritable lightning and thunder plant!
On Thursday, the 12th of December, we flew another kite and Mr. Marconi came out and personally saw to it that no flukes were made. The wind was still high and fitful, but with extreme care in which all of us, including Mr. Marconi, took a hand we somehow got it up and held it at about 400 feet.
Then the inventor and Mr. Kemp went into the wireless room. This was about 11:30 o’clock in the morning, St. Johns time. We held the kite as steady as we could and I knew that the supreme time in Marconi’s life was at hand. After waiting half an hour—it seemed like an eternity of time even to me—Mr. Kemp came out of the barracks and hurried over to where we were holding the kite. I couldn’t tell from his face whether the experiment had been a success or not, for an Englishman’s face always looks the same.
“We got it!” he told Mr. Paget. “Mr. Marconi got the signal first and then handed the head-phone to me. I heard the three dots several times in succession quite clearly.”
The three dots forming the letter S were those agreed upon by Mr. Marconi and his operators at the Poldhu station before he left England, as being the best signal to send out.
“Fine, old top,” exclaimed Mr. Paget, or words to that effect.
Mr. Kemp then went back to the barracks and in another half hour he emerged again and told Mr. Paget that the signals were still coming in and that there wasn’t the slightest doubt but that they came from Poldhu. He said that Mr. Marconi had asked that the kite be kept up for another hour if possible.
The wind grew more blustery than before, but anything was possible now for nothing so makes for success as a little success. The aerial was often more nearly horizontal than vertical, but Mr. Marconi got the signals as they were flashed out by Poldhu just the same. This ended our work for the day—that never-to-be-forgotten 12th of December.
The next day we flew the big kite using the aerial wire for a string again, for Poldhu had been instructed to keep on sending the letter S. The three short dots were sent out right along with short intervals between them, but the kite would take a header every time it was hit by a gust of wind and this would bring the aerial wire down so low the signals could not be heard, and, again, the receiver had to be kept in close adjustment.
After these last tests we hauled in the kite and then came the soft job of packing up the stuff. While we were doing this I threw a bomb into Mr. Marconi’s camp by telling Mr. Paget that I was Jack Heaton, the former chief wireless officer on the Andalusian. He told Mr. Kemp and they both smiled.
“Well, bless my heart, old man,” he said with about as much show of emotion as I do now in repeating it to you. “I rather thought, don’t you know, that you were as smart as paint—too smart to be trundling boxes around on a bally goods wagon. Who told you to come up here?”
“No one, Mr. Kemp, I just wanted to work under Mr. Marconi so that I could say I had done so and I came up from New York of my own accord.”
“Well, bless my old soul!” Mr. Kemp continued, which was his way of expressing his opinion of the nerve I had shown.
I kept right on packing up the stuff under the direction of the two assistants and after a while when Mr. Marconi came over Mr. Kemp spoke to him.
“I say, Mr. Marconi, this chap is Jack Heaton who was the operator on the Andalusian when she went down. He says he came up here to work with you. I don’t know who took him on; I didn’t and Mr. Paget says he didn’t.”
“Mr. Marconi, I’m mighty glad to meet you,” I said and held out my hand.
He grasped it firmly and shook it just once and that was worth another million dollars. What’s that? Well, it was worth a hundred anyhow.
“Extraordinary,” said the great inventor as though this big word had but two syllables in it. “Quite extraordinary. I hope, Mr. Heaton, you have not been disappointed.”
“I not only deeply appreciate the fact that I have been one of your assistants, sir, but to have been present when you received the first cableless signals across the Atlantic was an honor I never dreamed of.”
With his usual deliberateness the inventor did not immediately give to the world at large the wonderful results of his transatlantic experiments but waited for two whole days after he had completed his tests. When he did finally make them known there was quite a conflict of opinion, for some believed and others doubted that he had actually received the signals from Poldhu.
Many of those who had followed wireless telegraphy from its beginnings and knew somewhat of the theory of how it worked, set up a hue and a cry that the signals he had received were sent by ships at sea, or else they were due to static, as we call it now, that is, little charges of atmospheric electricity which accumulates on the aerial wire and finally discharges through the detector into the ground and this makes a click in the head-phones that sounds like a dot.
When the equipment was packed up Mr. Kemp paid me off—not at the measly rate of a truck driver or a roustabout in St. Johns, but an amount considerably over that which a first-class operator gets and my expenses for a round-voyage beside. I was soon headed once more for New York.
During the next two months Mr. Marconi’s critics were still carping about the cableless signals. And then the inventor put a big one over on them that made them crawl into their holes. In February, 1902, the s. s. Philadelphia sailed from England with the inventor on board. The wireless receiver was of the regulation ship and shore type, that is, it had a coherer and a Morse register, and it was nowhere nearly as sensitive as the detector and telephone receivers used in the Poldhu tests.
Mr. Marconi had arranged for the station at Poldhu to send messages every day at certain times until the Philadelphia arrived at New York. He adjusted the ship’s receiver himself and from the time she left England messages sent from the Poldhu station were printed on the tape until the ship was 1,551 miles out and from that time on signals were recorded on the tape up to 2,099 miles.
This time there was no possible chance for the doubting Thomases to say that there might have been an error, for there were the records printed in ink on a tape and not only Mr. Marconi but the officers of the ship saw them, and the tape at different times was signed by the Captain. Thus the last one read:
“Received on s. s. Philadelphia, Latitude 42, 1 N., Longitude 47, 23 W., distance 2,099 (two thousand and ninety-nine) statute miles from Poldhu. Capt. A. R. Mills.”
This then was the beginning of sending messages across the ocean without wires, or cableless telegraphy, as you call it, and I was in on it.
CHAPTER VII—A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR AT ARLINGTON
Nearly every one has the idea, or mania, or whatever you call it, of making some kind of a collection. It often begins to show itself early in a fellow’s life, and I’ve seen some old codgers in which it was still going strong at seventy.
For instance, when I was only 10 or 12 years old I began to collect postage stamps; mother started to collect trading stamps as soon as they were invented; dad has a wonderful collection of old carbureters, which ill-fated motorists had thrown away, and Messrs. Carnegie and Rockefeller are still collecting the coin of the realm.
The pet collections of the ladies of my home town consisted chiefly of souvenir spoons, china, pewter-ware and cut-glass while the men collected autographs and books, bugs and butterflies, antiques and paintings, fishing tackle and sporting guns. Then there was a sad-eyed young man whose parents were poor, but dishonest, who got a notion he would make a collection of all the solid silver water pitchers in and adjacent to Montclair, but the police made him to part with his novel collection and for the next five years he had ample time to collect his scattered wits.
A few years after I had been with Mr. Marconi at St. Johns, when he received the first signals flashed across the Atlantic, his and other companies and various governments began to put up and to operate gigantic cableless stations. It came to me that it would be a nice thing to make a collection of all these big wireless plants. In thinking it over, though, I had to admit there were a couple of obstacles in the way which would make it a mighty hard proposition to carry through—and these were: (1) I couldn’t get them all in our back-yard in Montclair, and (2) I didn’t have the ready money to buy them.
The next best plan, I pictured in my mind’s eye, would be to make a two foot scale model of each one of them and arrange them in a double row like the mummies in the Metropolitan Art Museum. As this scheme too, I figured, would take much time and money I compromised the matter by promising myself that I would visit each station in turn as they were put up and then in the end, I’d have a mental collection of them and this, at least, wouldn’t take up any room nor would it cost very much.
After Marconi had received messages up to 1,551 miles and signals up to 2,099 miles at sea on a Morse register from his experimental station at Poldhu the future of cableless telegraphy was an assured fact.
In 1902 stations of much greater power were put up at Poldhu, England, and at Glace Bay on the Newfoundland Coast and at Wellfleet, Mass. When the latter station was far enough along so that messages could be sent, Colonel Roosevelt, who was then President of the United States was asked to send King Edward VII the first cableless message across the Atlantic. It read:
“His Majesty Edward VII, London, England. In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and all the people of the British Empire. Theodore Roosevelt, Wellfleet, Mass.”
As the new station at Poldhu was not in shape to send back the reply of King Edward it had to be transmitted by cable and it read:
“The President, White House, Washington, America. I thank you most sincerely for the kind message which I have just received from you by transatlantic wireless telegraphy. I sincerely reciprocate in the name of the people of the British Empire the cordial greetings and friendly sentiments expressed by you on behalf of the American nation and I heartily wish you and your country every possible prosperity. Edward R. and I., Sandringham.”
That cableless telegraphy might be done on a commercial basis to the best advantage the Marconi Company decided to put up two new and more powerful stations, one at Clifden on the coast of Ireland and a new one at Glace Bay on this side of the Atlantic. When these stations were finished the regular transmission of both private and public messages across the Atlantic began in competition with the cable lines. The exchange of cableless messages was kept up for ten months when the station at Glace Bay burned down. Work on another station was started at once, however, and new apparatus was built for it.
Again communication was set up between Glace Bay and Clifden, the first messages being sent and received by the Postmasters General of England and Canada.
Now while it was very hard for any one to get a pass to go inside the cableless stations, even the directors of the Marconi Company having been denied that privilege, I went up to St. Johns the next summer for a week’s vacation and, incidentally, to see the station at Glace Bay. I felt pretty sure I should succeed for I knew one of the operators there.
The station is about three miles from the village of Glace Bay, on the island of Cape Breton; it belongs to Nova Scotia but is separated from it by the Strait of Canso. I didn’t have to ask where the station was for four enormously high towers stood out before me like great sentinels, imposing and mysterious and they can be seen for miles around. I could also make out a dozen very high masts.
The entire station is built on rising ground nearly a hundred feet above the level of the sea and below it lay the waters of big Glace Bay. Three low buildings—at least they looked very low to me as I gaged them with the height of the towers around them—are used for housing the apparatus.
After being halted several times by watchmen picketed on the grounds I finally got to the office and told the man in charge I wanted to see one of the operators, Howard Brice, who, you will remember, was one of my boon wireless chums of Montclair days.
We hadn’t seen each other since he and I became professional operators and we had a regular old sea-captain’s time of it recounting our experiences.
“Want to see the station, Jack?” he asked.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I replied in a don’t-give-a-care way.
The building we were in not only contained the office but a sound proof room in which the receiving sets were placed. When we crossed the threshold I was standing in a room where even the directors of the company could not tread, not because they were, like angels, afraid, but the men higher up were afraid to let them, for Marconi had a lot of would-be rivals in those days especially on this side of the Atlantic.
The receivers were of the usual ship type, with magnetic detectors and head-phones, and these were connected to the leading-in wire of the aerial through switches and passed outside through insulators in the wall. Several other wires connected to ordinary telegraph instruments also passed through the wall.
“You see, Jack,” my guide said, “these lines belong to the Western Union and the Canadian Pacific Railway Telegraph Company and by means of them the transatlantic cableless messages are received for transmission to England or are forwarded to their destination on the Continent.”
This was all interesting enough but there wasn’t much to see. We went over to another building which contained the power plant. In here a big steam engine was running an alternating current generator.
“This generator develops 820 kilowatts, or about 1,100 horsepower, and,” he continued, “this is the most powerful generator ever built for a wireless transmitter.”
Again interesting but as far as I could see they looked just like any other power plant. I sized them up just the same to see what I could see.
“Now, let’s take a peep at the sending apparatus,” and with that we strolled over to the third building.
“Sounds like a young thunder factory!” I ejaculated as crashes of electric fire tore through the air like small bolts of lightning.
“If we’d had this station down there in Montclair we’d have had them all by the ears, eh, Jack?”
“I’d say we would,” I returned as I measured with my eye the gigantic high potential apparatus.
This was made up of low frequency transformers, revolving spark-gaps which changed the high pressure alternating currents into high frequency electricity. Then there were the high pressure oscillation transformers, the condensers and switches of large size which were actuated by telegraph sending keys. Yes, indeed, here were the real sights of a cableless station and it was fully worth all that my round voyage cost me to see it. Having feasted my eyes on this greatest of twentieth century wonders to my heart’s content we went outside to get a close-up of the aerials.
“You see, Jack, we have two separate and distinct aerial wire systems. The first, which is strung up between the four great towers is used only for sending and the second which is suspended from the sticks is used only for receiving. These latticed towers are built of wood and each one is 410 feet high and together they form a square each side of which is 220 feet across.
“The sending aerial is formed of a large number of nearly parallel wires all of them spread out at the top and coming together at the bottom like an inverted pyramid. This aerial which has 60,000 feet of wire in it was suspended from the tops of the towers. A leading-in wire is secured to the ends of all the aerial wires where they come together at the bottom. It leads, as you see,” he pointed to the side of the building, “into the room through insulators where it is connected to the rotary spark-gap through a closed circuit.
“These masts, or sticks, which are arranged in three rows, hold up the receiving aerials. There are 18,000 feet of wire in it and it is made in the shape of a fan with the handle pointing in the direction of Clifden where our other station is located.”
Before leaving Howard told me that when he heard the Marconi Company intended to build a pair of cableless stations it was his great ambition to be one of the operators and in getting this position he had realized it. For myself I preferred to go on making my collection of cableless stations rather than to be planted up there at Glace Bay even though this was one of the three places in the world where the overland telegraph lines and transatlantic cableless meet and form a clearing house for the news of two continents.
It was my intention to sail for Belfast, Ireland—all the big steamers touch at that port on their way from New York to Liverpool—and go over to Clifden to see the cableless station there. Before leaving, however, I got it straight from Mr. Bottomley, who was the President of the American Marconi Company, that it was built from the same plans as the one at Glace Bay and that the apparatus was exactly the same, I concluded not to bother adding it to my collection but to go to Paris direct and get the Eiffel Tower station instead.
In this choice I was perhaps influenced somewhat by getting a job as second wireless officer on the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, a fine fast passenger express steamer of the North German Lloyd Line. This German ship—as in fact all other transatlantic liners—was equipped with the Marconi system and this grouched the German officers to the last limits of despair. A little newspaper was published on board every day and, of course, the news in it came via wireless. Whenever we had trouble in getting the messages from the stations at Wellfleet, Mass., or Poldhu, England—as was always the case more or less when we were in mid-ocean—the paper which the Germans ran printed them anyway just as we took them down, and then they commented on what a rotten system Marconi’s was.
The Kronprinzessin Cecilie touched at Plymouth, England, and then sailed across the English channel and touched again at Cherbourg, France, where I threw up the job, as my destination was Paris, and I arrived there a few hours later.
You know the Eiffel Tower was built in the midst of the ornamental park of the Champ de Mars as the biggest attraction of the Paris Exposition in 1885. When it was built wireless was an unknown means of communication and when the Exposition was over there was much talk about wrecking it, for it was not only useless but the Parisians thought it a hideous object to be stuck up in a park.
But when Marconi showed the world how to send messages across the ocean, and since one of the chief factors for long distance wireless transmission was a high aerial, it didn’t take half-an-eye for the French War Department to see that the Eiffel Tower, which was very nearly a thousand feet high, was just the thing to support an aerial.
Captain Ferrié, who had given much time to developing wireless apparatus for the Army, was put in charge of installing a small plant of about 15 horsepower simply to see what could be done with it. This experimental plant at once proved very useful in sending out time signals and weather reports to ships at sea and for the Navy Department to issue orders to Naval Commanders, but its greatest value was shown during the Moroccan troubles when the War Department was able to keep in direct touch with the Army there through its station at Casablanca.
The need of a new, permanent, high-powered station was strongly felt and work was commenced on it in 1908. Now instead of a couple of makeshift shacks at the base of the tower a concrete building was put in under the ground so that its roof was on a level with the surface of the park. This was done in order that a clear view across the grounds could be had and also to prevent the noise of the sparks from being heard in the neighborhood, which would not only be disturbing, but, what mattered more, any one who knew the Morse code could read all the outgoing messages a block away.
When I got settled in Paris I struck out to see the Eiffel Tower station. I found it was just about to be opened and it was my intention to try to get a job there for I believed it would be the only way I’d ever get to see the installation.
I asked a gendarme, as they call an armed policeman over there, who was standing hard by, where the office of the wireless station might happen to be—that is, I asked him in the deaf and dumb alphabet, and I gathered from the motions he made with his hands and arms that it was in the underground building. I hied me down the stairs and found myself in a small, central area-way from which doors around it opened into the office, receiving, dynamo and sending rooms.
Not being able to read French, as I explained to some officials afterward, I had carelessly opened the door on which the sign read Bureau de Transmitteur instead of Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil with the result that I saw the whole blooming sending apparatus. There were two operators in charge but they didn’t think I was worth noticing.
The sending apparatus was very much the same as that I saw in the cableless station at Glace Bay. This is easily explained because there is only one way to change a large amount of low pressure electricity such as is generated by an alternating current dynamo into high potential, high frequency electricity and that way is to use a transformer to step up the pressure of the alternating current; condensers are then charged with the latter current and this in turn is discharged between a pair of spark balls, or a rotary spark-gap which is used for the same purpose.
Not having been thrown out of the sending room and having seen all there was to see I opened the door to the Bureau de Recepteur and took a good look at the receiving apparatus. The detectors were of the electrolytic type, each of the cups which contained the solution having three wires sealed in it instead of one; this was the invention of Prof. Branly of Paris who got up the coherer several years before Marconi began his experiments in wireless.
The door of the Installation d’Alimentation Electrique was open and I glanced in at the dynamos, motors and storage batteries and from the size of its equipment I judged the station to be about 100 horsepower. Having seen it all I opened the door of the Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil and walked in just as we do in offices over here.
Somebody must have told the Directeur, or manager as we would call him in good old English, that I was coming for before I could explain in sign language that I wanted a job he, with the aid of a couple of other conspirators, hustled me unceremoniously out, up the stairs and on to the green grass of the park. No, it wasn’t exactly a case of sour grapes but after I had seen the apparatus of the station and added it to my Christian Science collection I didn’t want the job anyway.
The most interesting feature of the Eiffel Tower wireless station is its aerial and before I left I studied it carefully. It is a one-sided affair, but this is not because its designer thought well of it but in virtue of the fact that the Eiffel Tower sets at one end of the Champ de Mars.
If the tower had been built in the middle of the park the wires could have been brought down all around it on all sides thus forming what is called an umbrella aerial and this would have been good practise, as the engineers say. As it is there are six steel cables about ½ an inch in diameter secured to but insulated from the top of the tower on one side and these are guyed out in the shape of a fan and anchored at the other end of the park.
The cables are set in stone posts which project above the ground and to prevent simple folks from laying their hands on them, in which case their bodies would become conductors and allow a few million volts of high potential electricity to pass through them, the posts are surrounded by iron fences. The main cables are connected together about half-way between the ground and the top of the tower with other and lighter cables and these are joined to a single leading-in cable which runs down to and passes through a window to the top of the area-way in the underground building.
Finally the leading-in cable is connected to one end of a tuning coil, the other end of which is joined to a ground formed of metal plates having nearly 3000 square feet of surface and these are buried deeply in the earth far below the underground building.
Before I left the States to get the Eiffel Tower station the Navy Department had contracted with the National Signaling Company, an American wireless telegraph concern, for the most powerful cableless plant that had yet been built.
While I was in France work had been started on the towers and buildings at Arlington on the Potomac River near Washington and the machinery and apparatus for it was being built. After my return, with some jockeying, I landed a position with the National Signaling Company in the testing department and so had the opportunity of watching the whole installation grow up of which I shall tell you presently.
Finally when every piece of apparatus had been built and given exhaustive tests the equipment was shipped to Arlington, or, as some would-be high-brow tried to rename it, Radio, and the engineers and working force of the Company were sent to Arlington to install it, get it into working order and make the final tests required by the Government before the latter took it over.
When we reached Washington I could see the three great steel towers at Arlington looming up as high, it seemed to me, as the Washington Monument itself. On reaching the Arlington station which sets on the crest of a hill in a corner of the Fort Myer Reservation, the towers did not look so high, nor were they, for the tallest one was about 600 feet and the two shorter ones were 450 feet high. These three towers formed a triangle, the distance between the two shorter ones being 350 feet, and 450 feet between the taller and shorter ones. These towers, which were complete and ready for the aerials, rested on concrete buses and were insulated from the ground by slabs of marble. There are three buildings and these were also ready for the installation.
Now while the machinery and apparatus were being moved into the buildings and set in place a force of men was put to work on assembling the aerials and swinging them between the tops of the towers. These aerials are known as T, or flat-top aerials and right here I want to tell you how and why this type of aerial came to be.
In the early days Marconi, and those who followed him, thought that a high vertical wire, that is, one sticking straight up in the air, was all that was needed to get distance. On ships the masts are never very high and so the late Lieutenant Hudgens of the U. S. Navy tried stringing the wires of the aerial down to the bow and stern of the battleship Kearsarge to give the wires a greater length. This sloping aerial gave so much better results than the straight, or vertical aerial that he then suspended the wires between the top of the masts of the ship and, lo-and-behold, it worked even better than before and thus it was that the T, or flat-top aerial came to be.
To get the best results the aerials of two stations communicating with each other should both be vertical or flat-top, that is, a vertical wire will not receive from a flat-top nearly as well as from another one that is vertical and this is just as true the other way about. As all ships are fitted with flat-top aerials and as the Eiffel Tower aerial is neither the one kind nor the other but a sloping aerial and hence would receive from a flat-top as well as from a vertical aerial the Navy Department decided to use the T or flat-top aerial on the Arlington station.
We assembled, tested and put up the three flat-top aerials between the towers and connected them together so that in effect a single long aerial was formed. Porcelain insulators of the kind on which high tension power transmission lines are carried are used to insulate the aerials from the towers. The leading-in cable runs from the aerials to which it is connected down to the operating room through a copper tube set in a glass window.
The ground is formed of copper wires buried deeply in the earth and radiating in every direction from the station. This network of wires extends over, I should say, ten acres, and this, of course, makes a very good ground.
The current for energizing the sending apparatus is taken from the lines of the Potomac Light and Power Company; this runs an electric motor of 200 horse power which in turn drives a 100 kilowatt alternating current generator; the current from the latter flows through a transformer which raises the pressure of it to 25,000 volts. Next a battery of compressed air condensers are charged with this high voltage current and this is discharged by a rotating spark-gap. This spark-gap has a wheel, on the rim of which is set a number of metal points, or electrodes as they are called, and around them are an equal number of fixed metal points or electrodes.
When the wheel revolves sparks are made only when the electrodes on the wheel and those that are fixed around it are exactly in a line. Now instead of a few big sparks taking place every second, a thousand smaller ones occur in a second and this makes a whistling sound which is heard by the operator who is listening in at the distant station. The high frequency currents set up by the spark-gap then surge through an oscillation transformer which increases its pressure and finally into and through the aerial wire system where they are damped out in long electric waves.
The Morse telegraph key is placed in the receiving room and it works a control switch in the sending room. The control switch breaks up the current that flows from the generator into the transformer into dots and dashes.
The receiving instruments have both electrolytic and crystal detectors, the other parts being made up of the usual variable condensers, tuning coils and oscillation transformer and head-phones.
Well, at last everything was all ready for the final company test and I was mighty glad of it for things were getting very much on my nerves. A cableless station is altogether too big and cold-blooded a proposition for a fellow who likes a little excitement once in a while.
The Navy Department had fitted out the cruiser Salem with a sending and a receiving apparatus exactly like that of the Arlington station except it was very much smaller.
On February 13, 1913, the Salem sailed from the League Island Navy Yard at the mouth of the Delaware River for the Mediterranean Sea so that the official tests of the Arlington station could be made. The letter D was used for the test signals and we sent these out from Arlington for 15 minutes each time before the messages were transmitted.
Officials from the Navy Department gave us the messages to send and we were allowed under the terms of the contract to repeat each message three times to make sure the Salem got it, but no more. The Salem then followed by sending the test signal D and after this she sent four messages which the Captain gave her operators. This exchange of signals and messages was made twice a day throughout the Salem’s voyage across.
The messages we sent from Arlington were received by the Salem up to a distance of 2,375 miles, while the messages sent by the operators on the Salem were received by Arlington up to a distance of 1,000 miles. Far greater distances were covered by both the shore and ship stations but they were not accurate enough to meet the conditions called for by the Navy Department.
At night when the ether is quiet, as is always the case, the messages from both stations were sent and received over greater distances than by day and we were able to read what the Salem sent when she was out 1,600 miles and her operators got us up to 3,200 miles. Even when the Salem reached Gibraltar she could get Arlington’s signals but they were so feeble she could not take down our messages.
The National Signaling Company having successfully completed the tests imposed by its contract with the Government now formally turned Arlington station over to the Navy Department and having added that great station to my collection I was ready to get back to the big town.
CHAPTER VIII—ABOARD A WARSHIP AT VERA CRUZ
Trouble was brewing down in Mexico. Did I say was brewing? Well, what I should have said is that it had brewed, and will keep on brewing until Uncle Sam goes down there and cleans out Villa and all the other bandits and revolutionists.
You say the Monroe Doctrine won’t permit it? Now there you’ve got the best of me; I have a very hazy idea of what the Monroe Doctrine means but I’ve had occasion to observe that whenever a country can’t govern itself or the ruler of some country wants to govern the whole world Uncle Sam just naturally drives a gun carriage through the Monroe Doctrine and settles the affair to everybody’s satisfaction once and for all. He is very like a school teacher who is so much annoyed by a couple of his pupils that are constantly arguing and fighting he finally gets mad himself and licks both of them and then things quiet down and become decent like.
Getting down to cases, though, what I mean is that trouble was brewing between Mexico and the United States. The Mexicans had been fighting a long time among themselves; Madero who had been president of the republic was shot and killed; Huerta, an Indian of Aztec stock, was president at that time and he carried things on with a high hand, while Carranza, a rebel who wanted to be president, was, with the aid of Villa and other revolutionists, doing his best to wrest the government from him.
Your Uncle Sam thought about as much of President Huerta as he thinks now of the bandit Villa and would not recognize him as the head of the Mexican Government. His attitude naturally made Huerta very sore on the United States and, as I remarked before, trouble was brewing, for Huerta had been doing small, contemptible things to aggravate the United States and now he pulled off another low down trick.
It came about like this: in April, 1914, the U. S. S. Dolphin anchored in the bay of Tampico, Mexico, and the paymaster of the ship and some marines went over to town in a launch. Their object in going ashore was to buy some gasoline but before they had gone very far a number of Huerta’s Mexican soldiers arrested them, led them through the streets with a howling mob of greasers after them and then threw them into jail.
Rear Admiral Mayo of the Dolphin soon learned of the predicament of his men and demanded of the Commander of the Mexican army to set them free immediately, if not sooner. The Commander, knowing full well what would happen if he tried to hold the marines, let them go and apologized for the mistake, as he called it.
But the Admiral was not the kind of an officer to let the Army or any other branch of the Mexican Government insult our men and get away with it. He therefore avowed that the Huerta government should salute our flag by firing guns and that this must be done on or before a certain hour.
In the meantime the Admiral communicated the incident to our government at Washington and this was done by sending wireless messages from his flagship to our Darien wireless station at Camento, Panama, and from there it was retransmitted to Arlington. The Darien station which had been completed only a little while before, has a sending apparatus equal in power to the Arlington station but it can send and receive farther than the latter station because all three of its towers are 600 feet high.
Mr. Bryan, who was then Secretary-of-State, got in touch with Mr. O’Shaughnessy, the U. S. chargé d’affaires in Mexico City, and he took up the matter with President Huerta. The erstwhile President of Mexico also apologized profusely, believing that he could in this way get out of saluting our flag. Our government insisted that apologies were not enough but that the Mexican Government must salute our flag as Rear Admiral Mayo had ordered, and this Huerta finally agreed to do.
Knowing the Mexican disposition, whose watchword is mañana (which means to-morrow), and having every reason to believe that there would be a hitch in the proceedings, the Admiral extended the time in which the salute was to be given to May 12.
As before, the 12th went by and the New York papers stated that Huerta had failed in his promise to salute the flag. I doped it out that there would be big doings down there and, unlike the greasers, I did not let mañana interfere with my patriotic obligations to Uncle Sam, but I went right over to a recruiting station on 23rd Street and enlisted in the Navy as an “electrician for wireless telegraphy.”
At that time a man who wanted to enlist in the Navy as a wireless operator had to have “a working knowledge of telephones, measuring instruments, call bells, etc., and he must be able to connect up same to batteries and make minor repairs to them.” Also “familiarity with ordinary telegraph instruments while an aid in acquiring a working knowledge of wireless telegraph instruments, is not an essential qualification for enlistment as a wireless telegraph operator.”
This is what the enlistment circular I was given to read said but, of course, it was meant for men who knew a little about electricity and nothing about wireless telegraphy to start with. But here I was a full fledged operator, who had worked with Marconi and had helped to install the equipment in the Arlington station!
The circular went on to say that “applicants would be enlisted as electricians, third class, at $30 per month.” Some come-down for a man who had been a first wireless officer on a transatlantic liner and who had earned, at least on one round voyage, $200 a month, to say nothing of one who had worked with Marconi!
As I read on, the circular further stated “that men detailed as operators will be eligible to be promoted to higher ratings when they qualify as operators and have served the required probationary time under the regulations through the successive grades to chief electricians at $60 per month when they prove their ability to take charge of the wireless telegraph station and interior communication on board ship and have been assigned to duty.”
A man who knew nothing about wireless but wanted to become an operator was given a course of instruction at some naval wireless school or wireless telegraph shore station and when he was proficient enough he was assigned to a cruising ship either in charge of a station or else as an assistant to the electrician in charge.
As expert wireless operators were always in demand in the Navy I was at once assigned to the Alabama as an assistant operator and it was not long before I was rated as a first class electrician.
I joined the Alabama over at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, at New York, where she had been in dry-dock undergoing repairs and the next day we rode down the East River, through New York Bay and out to sea where we joined the North Atlantic Fleet under the command of Rear-Admiral Fletcher.
Surely enough, we got the news from Arlington on the 18th that Huerta had put off saluting the flag though still agreeing he would do so; President Wilson was heartily tired of it all and he finally sent an ultimatum to the sly old fox at Mexico City. This was to the effect that if he did not salute the flag by 6 o’clock of the afternoon of the 19th he (President Wilson) would ask Congress the next day to permit him to send the army and navy to Mexico to force him (Huerta) to do so.
To see that this was done on schedule time we received orders by wireless to sail on the 14th to Mexico. The North Atlantic Fleet was formed of some thirty-six warships, and these were manned by no less than 15,000 blue jackets and marines.
We were soon heading south. Talk about cleaning up Mexico! Why, we had a fleet that could have cleaned up the world, and a mighty pretty sight did she make, too. When we got there the fleet was split up into two squadrons, one going to Tampico and the other, to which the Alabama belonged, going to Vera Cruz, the Atlantic port nearest to Mexico City.
From what I gathered from the officers the purpose of President Wilson was not to make war on poor old war-ridden, moth-eaten Mexico, but simply to blockade the ports of Tampico and Vera Cruz and take over their customs houses until such time as Huerta could see the necessity of ordering the Commander of the Mexican Army to salute.
Two days later when we were steaming at full speed for Mexican waters, I caught the message that Huerta had again agreed to salute and since he knew we were coming I believed that he would do it this time sure and that our next orders would be to steam to northern waters. I was out of luck, that’s all. But we kept right on going just the same.
What Huerta really said was that if his Army fired the salute it would be right, he thought, for our Navy to salute in turn. Huerta was informed that this was always the custom when salutes of this kind were fired and that our Navy would, of course, return it.
We learned by wireless the next day that Huerta had again flopped over and he now wanted the salute to be fired gun for gun, that is, his army would fire the first gun, then our fleet would fire the next one and so on. Not only this but he wanted President Wilson to sign some kind of a paper and tied the whole proceedings in a hard knot with a lot of other strings. These conditions which Huerta wanted to impose President Wilson would not agree to and there was nothing else left for him to do but to back the ultimatum on the day he said he would.
On the way down I had plenty of time to look over the Alabama, to get acquainted with the men and to get my bearings. I can’t tell you here the little things that happened on board but I must say a word about the Alabama.
The battleship, in her day, was the giant of all the sea-fighting craft and her armor, that is, the steel covering that protects her, is a great piece of work. First of all the whole main deck is made of thick sheets of steel called armor plate and this covers the ship from her stem to stern-post just above the water line.
The part of a battleship where a shell hitting her would likely do the most damage is at her water-line and if a shell should hit there and explode it might tear out a big hole when she would quickly fill with water and sink. To prevent this from happening a very thick band of steel armor plate is riveted all the way round her at the water-line.
All the machinery and equipment of the ship including her engines, boilers and machinery, the powder magazines and shell rooms, the passageways through which the ammunition is taken, the wireless room, in fact everything except her guns, is in the hold below this strong deck. Of course there must be some openings in this deck but these are protected by gratings of heavy steel, the bars of which set closely enough together to keep fragments of shells from going through should one hit and explode on deck.
On our battleships the main battery is generally made up of four 10 inch, 12 inch or 13 inch breech loading guns and these are mounted in revolving turrets one of which is forward and one aft. The Alabama had four 13 inch guns in the large turrets and twelve 6 inch guns on the broadsides. I’m telling you that if Huerta had been at Vera Cruz when we got there and taken a look into the muzzle of one of our 13 inch guns he’d have saluted the flag without any more of that mañana business. As it was he was safely out of range of our guns for Mexico City is over 200 miles from Vera Cruz.
In the early days of wireless when every Tom, Dick and Harry was getting up a “new” wireless system the Navy Department tried out all of them. It would not use the Marconi system because the government wanted to buy the apparatus outright while the policy of the Marconi Company was to lease their apparatus.
The favorite type of wireless apparatus used by the Navy Department was known as the Telefunken, a German getup that was a combination of the Slaby-Arco and the Braun-Siemens and Halske systems. The transmitter of our station was one of this kind and consisted of an induction coil with a mercury turbine interruptor, an electric motor to run it and the usual key, loose coupled tuning coil and condensers.
The receiver was of a later type and had both a crystal detector and a vacuum tube detector, the latter being the invention of Dr. Fleming of England who has been Marconi’s technical adviser for many years. This detector is really a small incandescent lamp bulb with not only a filament but a metal plate sealed in it. The filament is kept at a white heat by a current from a storage battery.
When the telephone receivers are connected to the hot filament and the cold plate electrodes, the high frequency currents that are set up in the aerial by the incoming electric waves are changed into direct currents and the varying strength of these act on the head-phones. This detector is very sensitive and needs no adjusting.
Many of the messages we sent and received were in straight English but nearly all the important ones, especially those for and from Washington, were in code, the purpose of which was to prevent any one else, except our officers, from reading them and this kind of message is not very interesting but we know that something is going on anyway.
We anchored off Vera Cruz on the 21st and the natives must have thought from the number of warships that hemmed them in that we were going to blow them to smithereens. A few hours after our arrival we landed a thousand marines and they drove back Huerta’s soldiers and captured the customs house.
The chief reason this was done was because our government had got wise to the fact that a couple of German ships were scheduled to arrive at Vera Cruz with a cargo of guns and ammunition for Huerta, and our Commander had received orders on the way down to prevent this by seizing the customs house.
There was not much show of armed resistance on the part of Huerta’s men but in the scuffle that took place four of our men were killed and about twenty were wounded. I made up my mind right then and there that if I ever got a chance I’d blow the sombrero off of some greaser out of pure revenge.
The favorite method of warfare that is waged by the Mexicans is sniping, that is, they hide behind something and take a shot now and then at you. As a result of sniping a few days later the number of our men that had been killed was brought up to eighteen and the number of wounded to 71.
When things had quieted down Hart Douglas, another operator and I got a six hour shore leave. We buckled on our holsters and slipped our revolvers into them with small thought of having a chance to use them. We took a look around the town and all went well for awhile when zip, zip, a couple of bullets whizzed by my ear and Hart dropped with a bullet in his lung.
I whipped out my gun and wheeled around just in time to spot a couple of snipers lying on a near-by roof with their rifles pointing toward us. I emptied the five chambers at them as fast as I could pull the trigger. I got one of them; he raised himself to his feet and pitched headlong into the street. But the other one got me for he drew a bead on my gun arm which, also don’t forget, is my key arm. A couple of marines put poor Hart on a stretcher and carried him over to a field hospital. Another bound up my arm, walked with me over to the launch and when I got aboard my ship the doctor dressed it.