Jack Heaton and I had just finished our goulash at Moquin’s on Sixth
Avenue (New York), and the waiter, under the stimulus of a piece of
money, graciously removed the table cloth as he had been asked to do on
twelve previous occasions.
I took a couple of quires of blank paper out of my brief case and laid
them in front of me; then I produced a pair of fountain pens, one filled
with black ink and the other with red ink, the latter for writing on
chapter headings and putting in such corrections as might be necessary,
and all of which showed without any deduction that I was in for a
writing spell.
“Well, Jack, we’ve got down to the last chapter and this sitting will
finish it,” I started off encouragingly.
“I’ve told you all my experiences and if there’s any more to be said I
guess you’ll have to say it, Mr. Collins,” remarked the bored young
soldier.
“No, my boy,” I said firmly, “there are still some outstanding features
about wireless I want to talk over with you, and besides I have never
turned in a script to my publishers that had less than twelve chapters,
that is, except a shortcut arithmetic and the shorter a book of that
kind is the better.”
“I don’t know of any outstanding features as you call them; it seems to
me I’ve told you everything that ever happened to me. What else can I
say?” protested the young man.
“Give me your version of how we met, tell how you looked in that natty
overseas uniform, how I looked, what is on your mind now and all that
sort of thing. Then we’ll discuss the wireless transmission of power,
wireless airships and submarines, talking to Mars and finally about the
diamond fields of South America for I’m as interested in them as your
friend Bill Adams,” I suggested.
Jack laughed.
“Why, if I painted a word picture of you I’m afraid you and I’d part
company.”
“Hardly, my boy, hardly,” I reassured him. “I’ve gone through war, or
what war is; I’ve licked a couple of would-be Kaisers myself and I’m
going after a few more of them before I have done with life. I am,
forsooth, a bit battle scarred but my skin is as thick as that of a
rhinocerous. Any little thing that you might say about me I’d be
delighted to jot it down.”
“Let’s see,” reflected Jack, “when we left off yesterday I had just been
discharged from the hospital and was back with my folks in Montclair.
When I was able to get around I wanted to see Broadway and came over one
morning with dad. I was feeling bully as I was strolling down the trail
when suddenly I spied a man I once knew although I hadn’t seen him in
years, no, not since I was a kid operator learning wireless.
“He was a tall, spare man like yourself, whose legs, as honest Abe once
said, were long enough to reach to the ground. He might have been
anywhere up to a hundred and five, by which I mean his age and not his
weight; at any rate he had surely seen fifty summers and heaven only
knows how many hard falls.
“He was slightly stoop-shouldered, which I suspect was due to his
sticking to his desk too closely, or, perchance, because he couldn’t
shake the weight of his own tragedies from them. His face was pale,
quiet and cadaverous, but whatever troubles he may have had and however
many, they seemed not to have attacked his hair for it was all there,
nearly,--though I didn’t count ’em--with not a gray one to mar their
beautiful mouse-like color. In truth, he dressed like you, looked like
you and, by gravy, he _was_ you, Mr. Collins.”
Jack laughed heartily at this photo-impression of his old friend and I
was glad to know that after all he had gone through with here, there and
everywhere and the pain he had suffered and was suffering even then, he
was still able to see the humor in so grisly a subject. I laughed, too,
just to show him that I had not yet given up the ship and, hence, there
was still hope for us both.
“Turn about is fair play and now that you have given a word picture of
me I’ll give one of you. As I remember our meeting it was like this: I
was hurrying up Broadway one morning when suddenly a young soldier
stepped abruptly in front of me thereby barring any farther progress on
my part. I observed he had a trim fighting figure and wore the uniform
we love so well. He wore puttees and limped somewhat but from the medals
he wore on his breast I judged that he had met the enemy and that they
were his--and ours.
“His was a fine, heroic face and the very way his overseas cap set on
the side of his head, his smiling eyes, his hearty laugh and the firm,
smooth grasp of his hand was enough to show me that he was one of the
brave boys from over there who had caught ‘the torch from failing hands
and held it high in Flanders fields.’
“‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Collins?’ he cried. ‘I’m Jack Heaton, and
you used to let me make things in your laboratory over in Newark when I
was a kid!’
“‘Of course I remember you but, my, how you have grown. I never would
have known you. You were rather a frail chap then and now you’re such a
powerfully built young fellow.’ And then we talked about you and all
your experiences since I last saw you. I told you that you ought to
write a book and you said that there wasn’t much to write, and that if
it was done I’d have to do it for you.
“Then we agreed we’d collaborate, you to furnish the experiences and I
to write them out and I wanted to give you whatever was made from the
sale of the book and that I would take the glory of having written it
for my share of the profits; but you wouldn’t have it any other way but
that we would divvy fifty-fifty.”
“That part was all right,” put in Jack, “but what made a hit with me was
that you said you knew a publisher who would take the book and forthwith
we drew up a provisional table of contents. Then we went over to your
publisher; you explained the idea to the editor and gave him the table
of contents and we got the contract the next day. And do you know, Mr.
Collins, that my leg began to feel better right away!”
“That was some weeks ago, Jack, but I’ve enjoyed your company so much
and have been so interested in what you’ve told me I wish we had it all
to do over again. Well, Jack, we must to work again.”
“All right, but before we get busy I want to tell you of a _séance_ I
once had with King Solomon. Do you believe in spirits--in wireless
spirits?”
“Heard of all kinds of wireless and several kinds of spirits but don’t
know the breed called _wireless spirits_,” I admitted.
“I was introduced to one in London. One evening an operator from one of
the Red Star liners who was interested in magic, spiritualism and all
that sort of thing, wanted me to go with him to see a performance of
Maskelyn and Devant’s Mysteries at St. George’s Hall in Langham Place,
W. C.
“The mysteries of these mystifiers were mystical enough to mystify the
most mysterious and I saw everything from the wonderful East Indian rope
trick to the equally wonderful spirit rapping table. David Devant, the
celebrated conjurer, exhibited the table and he said--and nobody in the
audience disputed him--that the table possessed the ghostly property of
connecting this world with the next, the quick with the dead, that which
is now with that which is to be, and that it would rap out answers to
any questions which might be asked to prove it.
“Some of the wiseacres present laughed lightly at the conjurer’s
immaterial remarks but he assured them on his honor as a gentleman its
guiding spirit was no lesser an (astral) light than that of old King
Solomon himself. Thereupon Mr. Devant invited the audience to ply the
immortal part of the departed wise man with any questions that might be
fit and proper.
“Strangely enough while nobody believed in spirit communications as
exemplified by the rapping table everybody was most anxious to ask some
question which no one on this side of the borderland could answer. The
replies that King Solomon rapped out were deep and philosophical
although not always conforming to our ideas of ethics and morals.
Indeed, his very first reply to a question, which was put by some
guileless suffragette, nearly broke up the show. She asked him, as Bill
Adams would say ‘as man to man,’ how many wives a man should have, and
in that she thought she had trapped him even though he was beyond the
pale of the law. But Solomon showed his superior wisdom as usual and
rebuked the lady by rapping furiously on the table until he had nearly
eight hundred wives to his credit.
“To convince the audience that the table was just a common, single
legged, three footed one of the milliner’s variety the conjurer invited
a committee to step up on the stage and examine it; I went up with
several other men and we nearly had a private séance with old Sol. We
examined the table and found it O. K.; to me it seemed a little top
heavy but I made due allowance for this because King Solomon was a
brainy man.
“Now when the conjurer held it at arm’s length, or I did so as one of
the committee, it kept right on rapping out replies from the gone but
not forgotten spirit of the ancient King. Even when the table was passed
through the audience--”
“You mean _among_ the audience, don’t you, Jack? Even a spirit table
would have hard work passing through the audience.”
“I stand corrected. Even when the table was passed among the audience it
kept up its dark rappings to the great enjoyment of the audience. To me
the rappings had a more or less mechanical sound as if King Solomon’s
knuckles had turned to spirit gold, or common brass would do.
“I figured it out that the raps were done wirelessly, by which I mean
that the top of the table was hollow and contained a small but sensitive
receiver with a single stroke tapper and as the top of the table was
made of a sheet of burnished copper and the three footed base was of
iron with the connecting leg between them of wood it seemed reasonable
to suppose that these formed the aerial and ground.
“Although I listened hard I couldn’t hear the faintest sound of a
spark-gap working but it is an easy matter to put the transmitter in a
sound-proof booth.”
“And thus doth a little science make big skeptics of us all. Now tell
our young readers, Jack, how _S O S_ came to take the place of _C Q D_,
as the ambulance call of the sea.”
“It came about in this way. In 1896 the _International Wireless
Telegraph Convention_ was held in Berlin. Germany’s wireless men, from
her greatest scientists down to her lowly operators hated anything that
had to do with or was used by Marconi, so instead of _C Q D_, they
suggested that the letters _S O S_ be used. Unlike _C Q D_, the letters
_S O S_ have no especial meaning in themselves but they are easy to send
and to read and make, as a matter of fact, a good distress call.
“While _S O S_, was probably sent out many times by various operators
from that time on it did not become famous until the s. s. _Kentucky_
went down off the Diamond Shoals. Her operator did as many an operator
had done before him and has done since, that is, he kept sending the _S
O S_ call. Her engine room was rapidly filling with water but before her
dynamos were submerged and put out of commission the operator on the
_Alamo_ of the _Mallory Line_, ninety miles away, heard the call. The
_Alamo_ reached the sinking ship just in time to save her passengers and
crew before she went down.”
“Do you think it is possible to send a wireless message around the
world?”
“Not without relaying it. You remember back there in 1909 when all the
small fry who were following in Marconi’s footsteps were trying to do
something more wonderful than the great inventor? One of them made the
statement that he had sent out a train of electric waves from his high
power station which traveled completely round the world and in a small
fraction of a second he received the signals on the same aerial; and he
was backed up in it by a college professor, too.”
“I agree with you that college professors may sometimes be wrong, indeed
they are nearly always so,” I assured him.
“Now any kid operator knows,” continued Jack, “that electric waves are
radiated to every point of the compass around an aerial and hence even
if the waves sent out by it had enough power to go around the world they
would meet on the opposite side of the earth and neutralize each other.
“What do you think about signaling from the earth to Mars, Mr. Collins?”
“Not very much. It is never safe to predict, especially to make a
negative prediction, by which I mean to say that a thing can’t be done.
Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer and mathematician, proved by figures
and the known laws of nature, to his own satisfaction and a good many
others, that it was a physical impossibility to build a man-carrying
airplane.
“Langley who was just as big a figure in the world of science believed
that the thing could be done, built model after model that flew but when
he built his big machine to be piloted by a man it fell before it got
fairly into the air. Yet the same year that he failed, the Wright
Brothers, a couple of bicycle mechanics, put a gasoline engine in a
glider and flew. Since then bombing airplanes have been built that will
carry a ton or more.
“The moral is that if you must predict it is better to do so in favor of
rather than against a proposition unless you’re betting on a horse. My
opinion is that signaling to Mars will not be done by long electric
waves set up by electric sparks. Some years ago Tesla, the electrician,
was reported to have received signals from Mars by long electric waves,
that is wireless waves, while Pickering the astronomer got up a plan to
reflect signals to the red planet by short electric, that is light
waves. All he needed to do it with was ten million dollars’ worth of
mirrors and by forming these into a gigantic reflector he opined he
could concentrate the light of the sun into a beam and throw it on the
surface of Mars.
“And this puts me in mind of Tesla’s scheme to transmit power
wirelessly. To transmit power to run machinery and to control power at a
distance by wireless are two entirely different things. Since wireless
waves tend to radiate in all directions parallel with the surface of the
earth from an aerial, it is a very difficult matter to transmit enough
energy wirelessly in any one direction to have a sufficient quantity
left after it has passed through even a short distance to do useful work
such as running a motor.
“As early as 1905 Tesla took out patents for a system of wireless
transmission of power in which he proposed to use the free ether of
space instead of the ether in and around a wire to guide and carry it.
He built a great tower at Wardencliff, Long Island, New York, for the
purpose of radiating power but nothing came of the experiments he made
and after some years the tower was torn down.”
“You don’t believe then that it will ever be possible to transmit energy
for power purposes by wireless?”
“On the contrary, I believe it is possible but other discoveries must be
made before it can be done successfully and this is also true of many
other things which have been and are still looked upon as physical
impossibilities. As to controlling apparatus at a distance by wireless
that is, of course, just as easy as sending a signal, in fact it’s the
same thing.
“Tesla was the first to control the movements of a boat at a distance by
wireless and after him came many others. Even submarines have been so
equipped and controlled but since the surface of the sea reflects most
of the energy of the waves and absorbs the rest of it the boat must have
its aerial above the surface at all times or the waves will not reach
it.
“Attempts to control airships by wireless have been made time without
number but to no useful purpose for no effective distance can be had
between an airship and the sending station. Even sending wireless
messages from airplanes as you said yesterday is only done over a very
short distance and these limits are quickly reached because there is no
way of grounding it.”
“How do you think the distance could be increased?” Jack wanted to know.
“You are asking a hard question, my boy. It might be done by finding a
certain length of wave that would have a carrying capacity through the
ether comparable to that of light, yet be longer than a light wave and
shorter than the wireless waves we use for transmitting over land and
sea. But this is sheer speculation on my part. Well, Jack, we’re all
done and you see it wasn’t such a hard job as you thought. Before we go,
though, I should like to know just what you expect to do in the future.”
“Really, I don’t know, Mr. Collins, though I’ve been thinking pretty
hard about it lately, too. You see, I’ve reached an age where I’ve got
to boil down to business and make some money, but I don’t want any of
that swivel-chair-at-a-desk-on-the-’steenth-floor-of-an-office-building
for mine. I’d get into the airplane game but there’s no more money in it
than there is in wireless.
“My one best thought is to get a little party together, go down to
Brazil and open up a diamond mine,” and he looked fondly at the
glittering stone in his ring.
“What I’d like to do is to get Bill Adams and a few other kindred
spirits to go with me, clean out the Capunicas, and,” his eyes
brightened, “if you’ll join us I’ll make you King of the cannibals
instead of old Oopla.”
“Declined with thanks,” I bowed regally, that is as regally as a man can
bow whose back is already bent. “I haven’t the slightest desire to king
it over any tribe of man-eaters, but if you will let me go with you in
the capacity of adviser, medicine man and book-maker I’ll consider it.”
“Done, signed and sealed,” said Jack and we shook hands till we should
get together on the proposition.
THE END