“If we’d had this station down there in Montclair we’d have had them all by the ears, eh, Jack?”
“I’d say we would,” I returned as I measured with my eye the gigantic high potential apparatus.
This was made up of low frequency transformers, revolving spark-gaps which changed the high pressure alternating currents into high frequency electricity. Then there were the high pressure oscillation transformers, the condensers and switches of large size which were actuated by telegraph sending keys. Yes, indeed, here were the real sights of a cableless station and it was fully worth all that my round voyage cost me to see it. Having feasted my eyes on this greatest of twentieth century wonders to my heart’s content we went outside to get a close-up of the aerials.
“You see, Jack, we have two separate and distinct aerial wire systems. The first, which is strung up between the four great towers is used only for sending and the second which is suspended from the sticks is used only for receiving. These latticed towers are built of wood and each one is 410 feet high and together they form a square each side of which is 220 feet across.
“The sending aerial is formed of a large number of nearly parallel wires all of them spread out at the top and coming together at the bottom like an inverted pyramid. This aerial which has 60,000 feet of wire in it was suspended from the tops of the towers. A leading-in wire is secured to the ends of all the aerial wires where they come together at the bottom. It leads, as you see,” he pointed to the side of the building, “into the room through insulators where it is connected to the rotary spark-gap through a closed circuit.
“These masts, or sticks, which are arranged in three rows, hold up the receiving aerials. There are 18,000 feet of wire in it and it is made in the shape of a fan with the handle pointing in the direction of Clifden where our other station is located.”
Before leaving Howard told me that when he heard the Marconi Company intended to build a pair of cableless stations it was his great ambition to be one of the operators and in getting this position he had realized it. For myself I preferred to go on making my collection of cableless stations rather than to be planted up there at Glace Bay even though this was one of the three places in the world where the overland telegraph lines and transatlantic cableless meet and form a clearing house for the news of two continents.
It was my intention to sail for Belfast, Ireland—all the big steamers touch at that port on their way from New York to Liverpool—and go over to Clifden to see the cableless station there. Before leaving, however, I got it straight from Mr. Bottomley, who was the President of the American Marconi Company, that it was built from the same plans as the one at Glace Bay and that the apparatus was exactly the same, I concluded not to bother adding it to my collection but to go to Paris direct and get the Eiffel Tower station instead.
In this choice I was perhaps influenced somewhat by getting a job as second wireless officer on the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, a fine fast passenger express steamer of the North German Lloyd Line. This German ship—as in fact all other transatlantic liners—was equipped with the Marconi system and this grouched the German officers to the last limits of despair. A little newspaper was published on board every day and, of course, the news in it came via wireless. Whenever we had trouble in getting the messages from the stations at Wellfleet, Mass., or Poldhu, England—as was always the case more or less when we were in mid-ocean—the paper which the Germans ran printed them anyway just as we took them down, and then they commented on what a rotten system Marconi’s was.
The Kronprinzessin Cecilie touched at Plymouth, England, and then sailed across the English channel and touched again at Cherbourg, France, where I threw up the job, as my destination was Paris, and I arrived there a few hours later.