Jack Heaton, wireless operator

by A. Frederick Collins

You know the Eiffel Tower was built in the midst of the ornamental park of the Champ de Mars as the biggest attraction of the Paris Exposition in 1885. When it was built wireless was an unknown means of communication and when the Exposition was over there was much talk about wrecking it, for it was not only useless but the Parisians thought it a hideous object to be stuck up in a park.

But when Marconi showed the world how to send messages across the ocean, and since one of the chief factors for long distance wireless transmission was a high aerial, it didn’t take half-an-eye for the French War Department to see that the Eiffel Tower, which was very nearly a thousand feet high, was just the thing to support an aerial.

Captain Ferrié, who had given much time to developing wireless apparatus for the Army, was put in charge of installing a small plant of about 15 horsepower simply to see what could be done with it. This experimental plant at once proved very useful in sending out time signals and weather reports to ships at sea and for the Navy Department to issue orders to Naval Commanders, but its greatest value was shown during the Moroccan troubles when the War Department was able to keep in direct touch with the Army there through its station at Casablanca.

The need of a new, permanent, high-powered station was strongly felt and work was commenced on it in 1908. Now instead of a couple of makeshift shacks at the base of the tower a concrete building was put in under the ground so that its roof was on a level with the surface of the park. This was done in order that a clear view across the grounds could be had and also to prevent the noise of the sparks from being heard in the neighborhood, which would not only be disturbing, but, what mattered more, any one who knew the Morse code could read all the outgoing messages a block away.

When I got settled in Paris I struck out to see the Eiffel Tower station. I found it was just about to be opened and it was my intention to try to get a job there for I believed it would be the only way I’d ever get to see the installation.

I asked a gendarme, as they call an armed policeman over there, who was standing hard by, where the office of the wireless station might happen to be—that is, I asked him in the deaf and dumb alphabet, and I gathered from the motions he made with his hands and arms that it was in the underground building. I hied me down the stairs and found myself in a small, central area-way from which doors around it opened into the office, receiving, dynamo and sending rooms.

Not being able to read French, as I explained to some officials afterward, I had carelessly opened the door on which the sign read Bureau de Transmitteur instead of Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil with the result that I saw the whole blooming sending apparatus. There were two operators in charge but they didn’t think I was worth noticing.

The sending apparatus was very much the same as that I saw in the cableless station at Glace Bay. This is easily explained because there is only one way to change a large amount of low pressure electricity such as is generated by an alternating current dynamo into high potential, high frequency electricity and that way is to use a transformer to step up the pressure of the alternating current; condensers are then charged with the latter current and this in turn is discharged between a pair of spark balls, or a rotary spark-gap which is used for the same purpose.

Not having been thrown out of the sending room and having seen all there was to see I opened the door to the Bureau de Recepteur and took a good look at the receiving apparatus. The detectors were of the electrolytic type, each of the cups which contained the solution having three wires sealed in it instead of one; this was the invention of Prof. Branly of Paris who got up the coherer several years before Marconi began his experiments in wireless.

The door of the Installation d’Alimentation Electrique was open and I glanced in at the dynamos, motors and storage batteries and from the size of its equipment I judged the station to be about 100 horsepower. Having seen it all I opened the door of the Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil and walked in just as we do in offices over here.