There was a jigger, as Marconi called his tuning coil, and a battery of 18 Leyden jars made up the condenser for tuning the sending circuits. It was also fitted with a new kind of a key invented by Sammis who was at that time the chief engineer of the Marconi Company of America.
He called it a changeover switch but it was really a key and an aerial switch combined. In order to connect the receiver with the aerial all you had to do was to turn the key, which was on a pivot, to the right. When the key was turned it also cut off the current from the transmitter by breaking the sliding contact between them.
To throw on the transmitter and cut off the receiver you simply turned the key back to its normal position and this made the connection between the aerial and tuning coil and at the same time it closed the circuit connecting the source of current with the induction coils.
The up-to-date feature of this set was the storage battery which provided an auxiliary source of current so that in the event of the ship becoming disabled and water flooding the engine room, which would put the dynamo out of commission, the storage battery in the operating room could be thrown in and C Q D could be sent out as long as the wireless room remained above water. This was a mighty good piece of hindsight, for ships that might otherwise have been saved by wireless had gone down at sea with passengers, crew and cargo simply because the dynamos were drowned out.
The receiver was different from the one I used on the Carlos Madino for instead of a crystal detector we had a magnetic detector which Marconi had recently invented. While the magnetic detector was not nearly as sensitive as a crystal detector when you found a sensitive spot on the latter, still there were no adjustments to be constantly made as with the former.
Now I’ve told you something about the ship and her wireless equipment and right here I want to introduce Algernon Percy Jeems, Second Wireless Officer of the Andalusian and my assistant. Perce, as I called him, looked his name and lived up to it. He was as thoroughbred a gentleman as ever worked a key.
He wasn’t very big in body—only 5 foot 4—and he was of very frail build but he proved to be a giant when it came to sheer bravery and as for meeting death when duty called he was absolutely unafraid. In fact when he saw the grim old reaper bearing down on him he went out of his way to grasp him by the hand and said: “When I get through with this message I’ll be ready to go with you.” And he did!
Before I tell you what happened to the Andalusian and of the heroic nerve of Jeems, I want you to know what C Q D means and how it came to be used as a distress signal. It was not until Jack Binns, who stuck to his key for 52 hours on the ill-fated Republic and by so doing saved the lives of 1600 passengers and crew on board that C Q D came to be known the world over as a distress signal.
In the Continental code, which is used all over Europe by the wire telegraph lines, C Q means that every operator on the line shall give attention to the message which is to follow. It was natural then that when wireless apparatus began to be installed on ships that the Continental code should be the one used. C Q was the call signal employed to mean that every operator was to give attention to the message to follow, just as in the wire systems, or as it is said on shipboard to stand by.
Then the Marconi Company added the letter D which means danger, hence C Q D means stand by danger and when this signal is received by an operator at sea, no matter how important the message that he is sending or receiving may be, he drops it at once and answers the C Q D signal to find out what the trouble is.