My first thought was that I had struck some highly sensitive spot on my crystal and I tested it out only to find that wherever I put the wire point on it the signals came in just as clear and loud. I wondered. While I am not the seventh son of a son-of-a-gun nor do I claim any supernatural powers I got the hunch that down here in tropic waters where insurrections are the rule and not the exception all was not as it should be.
I told the Captain about it and while he didn’t take much stock in the idea he had a search made of the ship. One of the room stewards reported that he had found an electric cord with a plug end hanging from a lamp socket in room 138. It might have been for an electric iron, for a hot-water heater or any one of a dozen other electric appliances, he said, but it looked suspicious.
A more thorough search of room 138, in which the Captain and I took part, revealed a heavy suit case under the bunk, which had a place to plug in the cord, another for the receivers, and a key—at least this was my theory. A strict watch was kept on the stateroom and I went back and sent GA, which was the call for “Alvarada” every few minutes.
In the course of fifteen minutes or so I got the OK of the operator at GA. The steward who had entered the stateroom adjoining the one occupied by the suspect heard the faintest sounds of sparks coming from it. After this report I made a careful examination of my aerial and found that the leading-in wire from it which connected with my aerial switch had been cut while the end of the wire from my instruments had been connected to a wire so small it could scarcely be seen and this wire led to stateroom 138.
After connecting my instruments to the aerial again I immediately got in touch with the station at “Alvarada” and learned that no orders had been given by the Minister of War to change our port of destination. The Captain had the protesting passenger put in irons to be turned over to the government officials of Nicaragua and thus it was that another small insurrection was knocked in the head.
I had filed an application with the Marconi Company of America for a job on one of their transatlantic ships; it was in for nearly three months and I had long since concluded that it and I were pigeonholed. My great ambition now was to get a berth on one of the big ships that crossed the pond. Various operators had told me that it was useless to try to get in with the Marconi Company because the latter employed only operators who received their training in the Marconi wireless schools abroad.
Be that as it may on one of my return trips my father handed me a note from the Chief Engineer of the Marconi Company to see him. I did so and the result of that interview gave me the post of Chief Wireless officer of the s. s. Andalusian, one of the largest ships of the Blue Star Line.
Her route was between New York and Liverpool. Built by Harlan and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland, she was launched in 1901 and fitted for the transatlantic service in 1902. She was over 600 feet long, her breadth was nearly 70 feet and her depth was 40 feet. Talk about a ship, boy, the Andalusian was as far ahead of the Carlos Madino as that ship was ahead of a lifeboat.
The aerial of the Andalusian was formed of two wires 375 feet long and suspended between her top-gallant masts 200 feet above the sea and were held apart by two 8-foot spreaders. She was one of the first ships to be fitted with wireless and her wireless room was a specially built room on the port side of the forward saloon deck.
Although the apparatus was of the old Marconi type, having been installed when the ship was built, we could send from 300 to 400 miles with it and receive four times that distance. The transmitter was formed of two 10 inch induction coils the primaries of which were connected in series and the secondaries in parallel so that while the length of the spark was still 10 inches it was twice as fat and hence proportionately more powerful.