“It came about in this way. In 1896 the International Wireless Telegraph Convention was held in Berlin. Germany’s wireless men, from her greatest scientists down to her lowly operators hated anything that had to do with or was used by Marconi, so instead of C Q D, they suggested that the letters S O S be used. Unlike C Q D, the letters S O S have no especial meaning in themselves but they are easy to send and to read and make, as a matter of fact, a good distress call.
“While S O S, was probably sent out many times by various operators from that time on it did not become famous until the s. s. Kentucky went down off the Diamond Shoals. Her operator did as many an operator had done before him and has done since, that is, he kept sending the S O S call. Her engine room was rapidly filling with water but before her dynamos were submerged and put out of commission the operator on the Alamo of the Mallory Line, ninety miles away, heard the call. The Alamo reached the sinking ship just in time to save her passengers and crew before she went down.”
“Do you think it is possible to send a wireless message around the world?”
“Not without relaying it. You remember back there in 1909 when all the small fry who were following in Marconi’s footsteps were trying to do something more wonderful than the great inventor? One of them made the statement that he had sent out a train of electric waves from his high power station which traveled completely round the world and in a small fraction of a second he received the signals on the same aerial; and he was backed up in it by a college professor, too.”
“I agree with you that college professors may sometimes be wrong, indeed they are nearly always so,” I assured him.
“Now any kid operator knows,” continued Jack, “that electric waves are radiated to every point of the compass around an aerial and hence even if the waves sent out by it had enough power to go around the world they would meet on the opposite side of the earth and neutralize each other.
“What do you think about signaling from the earth to Mars, Mr. Collins?”
“Not very much. It is never safe to predict, especially to make a negative prediction, by which I mean to say that a thing can’t be done. Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer and mathematician, proved by figures and the known laws of nature, to his own satisfaction and a good many others, that it was a physical impossibility to build a man-carrying airplane.
“Langley who was just as big a figure in the world of science believed that the thing could be done, built model after model that flew but when he built his big machine to be piloted by a man it fell before it got fairly into the air. Yet the same year that he failed, the Wright Brothers, a couple of bicycle mechanics, put a gasoline engine in a glider and flew. Since then bombing airplanes have been built that will carry a ton or more.
“The moral is that if you must predict it is better to do so in favor of rather than against a proposition unless you’re betting on a horse. My opinion is that signaling to Mars will not be done by long electric waves set up by electric sparks. Some years ago Tesla, the electrician, was reported to have received signals from Mars by long electric waves, that is wireless waves, while Pickering the astronomer got up a plan to reflect signals to the red planet by short electric, that is light waves. All he needed to do it with was ten million dollars’ worth of mirrors and by forming these into a gigantic reflector he opined he could concentrate the light of the sun into a beam and throw it on the surface of Mars.