“Only the other day,” he went on, warming to his theme, “an airplane in France rose and flew and landed just as skillfully and accurately as though it had been managed by a pilot on board. And it was all directed by wireless from the ground. The machine was a big bombing plane with a thirty-three horsepower engine. It flew easily, maneuvered freely, and landed and rose several times in succession, without a hitch of any kind. A stabilizer with four gyroscopes maintained the equilibrium automatically, while a speed device cut off the spark when the plane neared the ground, so that it landed so gently that it wouldn’t have broken a pane of glass.
“And mark my words, that’s only one step in the process of dispensing with human assistance altogether. I’ll bet that in my lifetime ships will be sailing across the ocean without a steersman, railroad trains will go speeding across the country at the rate of sixty miles an hour without a man at the throttle.”
“It’ll throw a lot of men out of their jobs,” remarked Joe.
“For a while,” admitted Johnson. “Just as the railroad threw bus drivers out of their jobs, just as the spinning jenny threw weavers out of their jobs, just as every advance in civilization has made readjustments necessary. But, after a while, it makes more and better jobs, and raises the general level of human happiness.”
“You’re safe, whatever happens,” grinned Joe.
“I’m not so sure of that,” was the unexpected answer. “Radio itself may throw me out of a radio job.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Herb.
“Sounds to me something like a riddle,” said Jimmy, rubbing his forehead in perplexity.
“Fact, just the same,” Johnson reiterated. “Radio itself will drive radio without the aid of an operator. They proved that that was possible in New York only a few weeks ago. By an arrangement of the controlling circuit of the longest commercial radio service in the world, from New York to Warsaw, Poland, they were able to make automatic signaling a substitute for operators. Radio was made to control radio, and thus over an eight thousand five hundred mile circuit continuous signaling was produced without human assistance.”
“Sounds to me as though I were listening to you read me something out of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” said Herb.