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.