CHAPTER VI. THE DIGNITY OF WIRELESS. ITS APPLICATIONS AND SERVICE. WIRELESS IN THE ARMY AND NAVY. WIRELESS ON AN AEROPLANE. HOW A MESSAGE IS SENT AND RECEIVED.
Wireless telegraphy and that precocious infant, wireless telephony, have outlived all the speculative and tentative achievements of their early days and have established themselves in an important and settled position among our methods of conveying intelligence.
The field has been so greatly enlarged in recent years and the apparatus and methods so improved that the broadest possible view of its future development and importance is justified. And there must inevitably come the time when our merchant marine and wireless service will come under such reasonable regulation that it will be removed from any dependence upon stock jobbing wireless telegraph and telephone companies.
FIG. 100.—Special light weight wireless telegraph set for airship service.
Official sources show that the equipping of sea-going vessels with wireless apparatus is progressing at a rapid rate and it is not difficult in the face of certain facts to appreciate the enormous volume of business that sooner or later will be handled by wireless. Three hundred and sixty-three United States naval vessels and about eight hundred merchant vessels are equipped at this writing. The large number of commercial shore stations, army forts and posts, and those used by corporations, isolated stations, etc., for various private purposes comprise a list which reaches an enormous total.
FIG. 101.—Telefunken wireless cart, showing transmitter.
Whatever may have been the status of wireless previous to the Titanic disaster, it now occupies a position far more important than that taken merely from any commercial standpoint, for it is no longer merely a convenience to business or a means of furnishing the latest news for the entertainment of passengers, but is a life-saving proposition taking its place with the elaborate and costly systems of railroad signals.
