“Mr. Marconi, I’m mighty glad to meet you,” I said and held out my hand.
He grasped it firmly and shook it just once and that was worth another million dollars. What’s that? Well, it was worth a hundred anyhow.
“Extraordinary,” said the great inventor as though this big word had but two syllables in it. “Quite extraordinary. I hope, Mr. Heaton, you have not been disappointed.”
“I not only deeply appreciate the fact that I have been one of your assistants, sir, but to have been present when you received the first cableless signals across the Atlantic was an honor I never dreamed of.”
With his usual deliberateness the inventor did not immediately give to the world at large the wonderful results of his transatlantic experiments but waited for two whole days after he had completed his tests. When he did finally make them known there was quite a conflict of opinion, for some believed and others doubted that he had actually received the signals from Poldhu.
Many of those who had followed wireless telegraphy from its beginnings and knew somewhat of the theory of how it worked, set up a hue and a cry that the signals he had received were sent by ships at sea, or else they were due to static, as we call it now, that is, little charges of atmospheric electricity which accumulates on the aerial wire and finally discharges through the detector into the ground and this makes a click in the head-phones that sounds like a dot.
When the equipment was packed up Mr. Kemp paid me off—not at the measly rate of a truck driver or a roustabout in St. Johns, but an amount considerably over that which a first-class operator gets and my expenses for a round-voyage beside. I was soon headed once more for New York.
During the next two months Mr. Marconi’s critics were still carping about the cableless signals. And then the inventor put a big one over on them that made them crawl into their holes. In February, 1902, the s. s. Philadelphia sailed from England with the inventor on board. The wireless receiver was of the regulation ship and shore type, that is, it had a coherer and a Morse register, and it was nowhere nearly as sensitive as the detector and telephone receivers used in the Poldhu tests.
Mr. Marconi had arranged for the station at Poldhu to send messages every day at certain times until the Philadelphia arrived at New York. He adjusted the ship’s receiver himself and from the time she left England messages sent from the Poldhu station were printed on the tape until the ship was 1,551 miles out and from that time on signals were recorded on the tape up to 2,099 miles.
This time there was no possible chance for the doubting Thomases to say that there might have been an error, for there were the records printed in ink on a tape and not only Mr. Marconi but the officers of the ship saw them, and the tape at different times was signed by the Captain. Thus the last one read: