“You kids,” he said, pointing his long bony finger at my right eye, “make life a nightmare for us professionals. Every kid that knows how to splice a wire seems to be crazy to send messages. Ninety-nine out of a hundred know nothing of wireless and their signals are simply a jumble of sparks.
“A kid has no business learning wireless at all. I can tune out amateur low power stations, but they are always breaking in in the middle of a message. I haven’t got any use for a wireless kid. So hotfoot it and don’t hang around here any more.”
This was too much for even a fellow with a cast-iron nerve like mine, so I turned on my heel, said sore-head under my breath and took a walk on the promenade deck. He was the first professional operator I had ever met and I was certainly disappointed in the way he treated a brother operator. I wondered then if all professional operators had his kind of a grouch and if so, I didn’t want to be one of them.
Not to be out-generaled I thought I’d try one more scheme and that was to use a couple of pieces of wire five or six feet long for the aerial and ground, hook them on to the detector of my receiver, fix the free end of the aerial over the window and lay the free end of the ground wire on the floor. In this way there would be no direct metal connection between his transmitter and my receiver.
The waves from his set were so powerful that they easily bridged the gap and I listened-in whenever I wanted to and knew everybody’s business on board all the way down to Realjo. But I kept away from the wireless room and that operator. Before we landed I found out from the second officer that the operator was only a substitute for the regular one and that it was the second trip he had ever made.
After a stay of a couple of weeks in Realjo we started back for New York on the Almirante. I didn’t know whether to tackle making friends with the operator or not. I had swallowed a pretty bitter wireless pill on the way down and didn’t care about repeating the dose.
The second day out I ventured close enough to the instrument room to see what the outfit looked like and to size up the operator in charge.
He was a big fellow with a full rounded face and every little while he would whistle a popular air which fitted in nicely with the bright sunshine that flooded the room. At the same time he would listen-in and finally he sent O. K., which in the wireless code means that he had heard the operator of the distant station who was calling him and that he was ready to take his message.
Of course I couldn’t tell what was coming in but I was aching to put those head-phones on just once. When he had finished writing out the message he put it in an envelope and started to leave the room. Spotting me standing by he beamed pleasantly.
“Oh! I say, boy, I wonder if you would be so kind and condescending as to take this message to the Captain? Some other messages are likely to come in and I don’t want to leave my post.”