The exhibitors at Dayton planned to have two planes in the air at once, so that the officials might listen in on their conversation at a ground station located on the top of a hill near the flying field. By hard work the inventors got their equipment installed, and just at dark on the evening before the day of the trial one machine equipped with wireless went up into the air and held successful communication with the ground.
The next morning when the official party arrived the members viewed the apparatus in the planes while the inventors explained what it was expected to do. The visitors were then conducted to the station on the hill, where those who were putting on the show had rigged up a megaphone attached to the wireless receiver so that everyone could hear without putting on a head set.
The attitude of some of the officials, particularly those from the foreign nations who had had experience in war flying, was skeptical, if not bored. The planes left the ground, and when the machines had gone up so high that they were but specks in the sky the receiver began emitting the premonitory noises that indicated that the men in the planes were getting ready to perform. Suddenly out of the horn of the loud-speaking receiver came the words: "Hello, ground station! This is plane No. 1 speaking. Do you get me all right?"
Looks of amazement came over the faces of all those who had never heard the wireless phone in operation before. Soon came the signal from plane No. 2, and then the demonstration was on. Under command from the ground the planes were maneuvered over much of that part of the country. They were sent on scouting expeditions and reported what they saw as they traveled through the air. Continuous conversation was carried on, and finally, upon command, the planes came back out of space and landed as directed.
From that moment there was nothing but enthusiasm in all quarters for the radiophone upon airplanes. It was no longer a question whether the device would work or was any good, but a question of how soon the company could start manufacture and in what quantities the device could be produced.
The demonstrations Col. Culver had been conducting in France began, too, to bear fruit. Both the British and the French had developed experimental apparatus by this time and this was examined and tested. Then cablegrams began to arrive from abroad requisitioning the American apparatus in large quantities—convincing evidence that it had greater promise than any other.
But still difficulties were ahead, for at this stage the wireless telephone consisted of a few experimental parts built by hand. It remained a heavy task to standardize the equipment and perfect the multitude of designs and drawings that must be in existence before quantity manufacture could begin. All sorts of mechanical details slighted in the experimenting and taken care of by makeshift devices had to be worked out as practical manufacturing undertakings. It was another case of day-and-night work to put the mechanism into condition for production. The factory of the Western Electric Co. is in Chicago but its drafting rooms and laboratories are in New York. As soon as any detail was finally worked out the drawings were taken by messengers and rushed to Chicago where the work of producing the manufacturing tools had begun. Only the fastest passenger trains between New York and Chicago were patronized in this part of the development.
As every detail was perfected it had to be checked by actual test in the field, so that the company's engineers were almost constantly in the air. One of these experts made 302 flights himself; and a total of 690 flights, of a combined duration of 484 hours, was required in the experimental stage of the mechanism.
Immediately after the official trial in December the Government ordered thousands of sets of the radio telephone. In spite of the enormous detail involved in making ready for production, the first systems were turned out early in 1918, well ahead of the delivery of the airplanes in which they were to be used.