The effect of these brilliant lights on the broad bosom of the ocean, especially during A Scene of Thrilling Beauty. a storm, was grand beyond the power of pen to describe. A distant wave could be clearly seen approaching one of these electric, mid-ocean buoys. On it sweeps, a tremendous current that no human power could stem. The rugged blue wall of the great wave glistens in the dazzling electric light as its huge side and foaming crest reaches the electric buoy. It seems as though the light and buoy must be swept to destruction and buried from sight. As the great wave sweeps over the light, all becomes dark for a few seconds, but when the mighty billow has swept on, the electric arc again blazes forth in the trough of the sea bidding defiance to Neptune’s frowns. These mighty mid-ocean scenes, viewed from the deck of an electric ocean greyhound, were thrilling in the extreme.
Along the great chain of coast-line of the United States of the Americas, from the State of Maine to the States of Venezuela, Brazil and Patagonia, also on the Pacific slope from the States of Chile, Peru and Colombia to the States of West Canada and Alaska, every rock or promontory dangerous to navigation, was ablaze with electric beacons. Electricity was common as air. Oceans and continents were made more habitable to man. It became in 1999 the world’s sun by night.
The perfect and absolute control of electricity by the scientists of the twentieth century benefited both ærial and ocean navigation, in furnishing the motive power. But these were benefited in another and hardly less remarkable manner by the perfected Marconi system of wireless telegraphy, which in the nineteenth century was comparatively unknown and in its early experimental stage. In ærial and ocean navigation wireless telegraphy proved an invaluable aid. The bright, young Italian inventor became a benefactor of the human race.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Wireless Telegraphy.
The great advantages of wireless telegraphy in navigation. Ships are enabled to communicate with shore during voyages. Messages received and sent at any time en route. Collisions at sea reported at once. Belated steamers cause no anxiety.
In the old-fashioned days of sails and steam, when a vessel left port and passed out of sight, she instantly became a whole world in herself. Communication had been severed with the outer world. The condition of a sailing vessel during a calm was a picture of helplessness. Steamships were more self-reliant—they at least controlled their own course. But both classes of ships, whether propelled by sail or steam, once out of sight of land, were temporarily shut out from the busy world.
During these enforced absences upon an ocean voyage, great events frequently happened of which passengers, officers and crews were necessarily ignorant of. At the Shut Out of the World. termination of a long or short voyage, the first news could only be obtained from the pilot-boat which met the approaching vessel far out at sea. War might be on the eve of declaration as the vessel left port, battles might be fought, the enemy might be vanquished and even peace declared and a knowledge of all these events would only reach the tardy mariner upon the arrival of the vessel at her port of destination.
Such a condition of affairs, often the cause of the deepest anxieties on the part of ocean travelers, might answer well enough for the days of the Crusaders, when kings of Great Britain went to Palestine to battle for the Cross, and never again heard from home in three or four years’ time. When Napoleon, that meteor of the nineteenth century, left the shores of la belle France for the rocky desolation of St. Helena, it was over a year before he received any news from Paris. The same conditions ruled in 1899. Steam had rendered ocean voyages shorter and more punctual. But the main difficulty still existed. Passengers on our ocean-liners during a voyage knew as little of occurrences at home as those who traveled in the days of the Vikings and Crusaders. In this respect (as in many others), the world in 1899 was no better off than in the days when the Roman legions landed on the shores of Britain. The nineteenth century and the centuries before Christ were upon equal footing in this respect.