The Sayville Wireless Station on Long Island was for a long time a
successfully controlled medium for the direction of spy and propaganda
work in this country as well as for communication with wireless
stations in Germany, in Central and South America, with wireless ships
interned, etc., etc. To this and the other German-owned commercial
plants in the United States Capt. Boy-Ed added amateur stations of
more or less extended radius as auxiliaries. But owing to complaints
of frequent interference with regular messages, the “United States
presently ordered the closing of all private wireless stations, and
those amateurs who had been listening out of sheer curiosity to the
air conversation cheerfully took down their antennæ. Not so, however,
a prominent woman in whose residence on Fifth Avenue lay concealed
a powerful receiving apparatus. Nor did the interned ships obey the
order: apparatus apparently removed was often rigged in the shelter
of a funnel, and operated by current supplied from an apparently
innocent source. And the secret service discovered stations also in
the residences of wealthy Hoboken Germans, and in a German-American
‘mansion’ in Hartford, Connecticut.”
[Illustration:
© _Underwood, and Underwood._