The wireless telephone enables a passenger on board ship to communicate direct with his home by relaying the message over the line wires. By the same means the captain of a ship can call his home office and communicate with the owner of the vessel.
Telegraphs and telephones are the nerves of the world, carrying swift messages from its brain centers to its hands, annihilating distance in thought. All differences between men as individuals and people as nations can be traced to the lack of close contact. Reduce or annihilate all distance in thought and action, and mankind would possess unbounded opportunities for peaceful economic and healthful development. No force more vital than the possibilities of wireless has ever presented itself or could be demanded to attain such an end. Such a statement, in the light of actual developments, might even be considered conservative, and is neither absurd nor the dream of a vivid imagination. The greatest obstacle to all efforts in radically new directions is the resistance of the human race. The antagonism of prejudice and skepticism can only disappear when the world as a whole grasps a new proof and learns to appreciate it. Inertia must be overcome, and the great masses set to thinking and striving toward an end before the aweing genie finally bursts forth and amazes the Aladdins of science.
Within the memory of older men and women are primers of science, which speculate about the developments of electrical force, and guardedly discuss its possibilities.
And now, electricity—this mysterious agent-has multiplied the muscular strength of man a billion times. The tasks of Hercules are now but chores to be accomplished by the closing of a switch. Mighty rivers roar through intake and turbine to drive the wheels of industry in a distant city and turn the night into day. Any attempt to chronicle all the applications of this wondrous power would be absurd. Such is electricity to-day.
Only a few years ago Langley launched his famous aerodrome over the waters of the Potomac, while the world stood by and sneered, ridiculed a man whose work is now one of the classics of aeronautical literature, and scoffed at a machine whose principles embodied the conclusions of years of careful thought and scientific effort.
A decade later and aeroplanes have become a living reality. A man and a little frame of sticks and canvas can throw off the fetters of gravity and go soaring dizzily two miles up into the blue sky, and daring more, come skimming and diving back to earth with motor dead. Such wonders only came to pass, however, when numbers of men accepted the problem as one to be solved by trying, and bent their energies toward its solution. Science has not reached the limits of its resources. It never will. The art of wireless may always be embarrassed by novelty in many directions.
FIG. 154.–Fong Yee, a Chinese amateur wireless operator at Oakland, Cal., who is also an aviator and has been summoned home by the republican Chinese government to demonstrate apparatus of his own invention to the Chinese army.
One of the greatest steps forward toward the day when methods and appliances regarded as permanent as the mountains will pass and be considered only as the curious remnants of a cruder age is the interest of 200,000 wireless amateurs in the United States. Some of these will develop into men who will bring some of the wonders of the future to their full fruition.
