Large arc-lamps slung on yards over the deck give great help for coaling and unloading vessels at night time. The touch of a switch lights up the deck with the brilliancy of a well-equipped railway station. The day of the "lantern, dimly burning," has long passed away from the big liner, cargo boat, and warship.
WIRELESS TELEGRAPHY INSTRUMENTS
Solitude is being rapidly banished from the earth's surface. By solitude we mean entire separation from news of the world, and the inability to get into touch with people far away. On the remote ranches of the United States, in sequestered Norwegian fiords, in the folds of the eternal hills where the only other living creature is the eagle, man may still be as conversant with what is going on in China or Peru as if he were living in the busy streets of a capital town. The electric wire is the magic news-bringer. Wherever man can go it can go too, and also into many places besides.
We must make one exception—the surface of the sea. Cables rest on ocean's bed, but they would be useless if floated on its surface to act as marine telegraph offices. Winds and waves would soon batter them to pieces, even if they could be moored, which in a thousand fathoms may be considered impracticable.
So until a few years back the occupants of a ship were truly isolated from the time that they left port until they reached land again, except for the rare occasions when a passing vessel might give them a fragment of news.
This has all been changed. Stroll into the saloon of one of our large Atlantic liners and you will see telegram forms lying on the tables. In the 'nineties they would have been about as useful aboard ships as a mackintosh coat in the Sahara. A glance, however, at pamphlets scattered around informs you that the ship carries a Marconi wireless installation, and that a Marconi telegram, handed in at the ship's telegraph office, will be despatched on the wings of ether waves to the land far over the horizon.
Inside the cabin streams of sparks scintillate with a cracking noise, and your message shoots into space from a wire suspended on insulators from one of the mast heads. If circumstances favour, you may receive a reply from the Unseen before the steamer has got out of range of the coast stations. The immense installations at Poldhu, Cornwall, and in Newfoundland, could be used to flash the words to a ship at any point of the transatlantic journey. Owing to lack of space, and consequently power, the steamer's transmitting apparatus has a limited capacity.
The first shipping company to grasp the possibilities of the commercial working of the Marconi system was the Nord-Deutscher-Lloyd, whose mail steamer, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, was fitted in March, 1900. At the present time many of the large Atlantic steamship companies carry a wireless installation as a matter of course, ranking it among necessary things. The Cunard, American Atlantic Transport, Allan, Compagnie Transatlantique, Hamburg-American, and Nord-Deutscher-Lloyd lines make full use of the system, as the conveniences it gives far outweigh any expense. A short time since maritime signalling was extremely limited in its range, being effected by flags, semaphores, lights, and sounds, which in stormy weather became uncertain agents, and in foggy, useless. Also the operations of transmitting and receiving were so slow that many a message had to remain uncompleted.