The Story of Great Inventions

by Elmer Ellsworth Burns

With this arrangement it was possible to work only two stations at one time. Though stations were to be established in all the cities of Great Britain, only one message could be sent at one time, and all stations but one must keep silence, because a second series of waves would mingle with the first and confusion would result.

Marconi's next effort was to make it possible to send any number of messages at one time. This led to his system of tuning the sending and receiving instruments. With this system the receiving instrument will take a message only from a sending instrument with which it is in tune. It is possible, therefore, for any number of wireless-telegraph stations to operate at the same time, the waves crossing one another in all directions without interfering, each receiver responding to the waves intended for it. An ocean steamer can, with the tuned system, send one message and receive another from a different station at the same time.

Marconi's ambition was to send a wireless message across the Atlantic. Quietly he made his preparation, building at Poldhu, Cornwall, England, a more powerful transmitter than had yet been used. At noon on the 12th of December, 1901, he sat in a room of the old barracks on Signal Hill, near St. Johns, Newfoundland, waiting for a signal from England. His assistants at the Poldhu station were to telegraph across the ocean the letter "S" at certain times each day. On the table was the receiving apparatus, made very sensitive, and including a telephone receiver. A wire led out of the window to a huge kite, which the furious wind held four hundred feet above him. One kite and a balloon used for supporting the antenna had been carried out to sea. He held the telephone receiver to his ear for some time. The critical time had come for which he had worked for years, for which his three hundred patents had prepared the way, and for which his company had erected the costly power station at Poldhu. Calmly he listened, his face showing no sign of emotion. Suddenly there sounded the sharp click of the tapper as it struck the coherer. After a short time Marconi handed the telephone receiver to his assistant. "See if you can hear anything," he said. A moment later, faintly and yet distinctly, came the three little clicks, the dots of the letter "S" tapped out an instant before in England. Marconi's victory was won.

A flying-machine can be equipped with a wireless-telegraph outfit, so that a man can telegraph while flying through the air. Two men are needed, one to operate the flying-machine, the other to send the telegraphic messages. This has been done with the Wright machine and with some dirigible balloons. Of course, the wireless instruments on the flying-machine cannot be connected to the ground. Instead of the ground connection there is a second antenna.—one antenna on each side of the spark-gap. While in the ordinary wireless instruments the discharge surges back and forth between the antenna and the earth, in the flying-machine wireless the discharge surges back and forth between the two antennæ. In the Wright machine, when equipped for wireless telegraphy, the two antennæ are placed one under the upper plane, the other under the lower plane of the flying-machine.

More power is required for the wireless than for the wire telegraph. In the wire telegraph about one-hundredth horse-power is required to send a message one hundred and twenty miles. To send a message the same distance with the wireless requires about ten horse-power, or a thousand times as much as with the wire telegraph. This is because in the wireless telegraph the waves go out in all directions, and much of the power is wasted. In the wire telegraph the electric waves are directed along the wire and very little of the power is wasted. For the same reason a person's voice can be heard a long distance through a speaking-tube. The speaking-tube guides the sound and prevents it from scattering somewhat as the wire guides the electric waves.

The overhead wires of a wireless-telegraph station send out a "dark" light while a message is being sent. (See frontispiece.) Standing near the station on a dark night one can see nothing, but can hear only the terrific snapping of the electric discharge. The camera, however, shows that light goes out from the wires. It is light of shorter waves than any that the eye can perceive, but the sensitive film of the photographic plate makes it known to us.

The Wireless Telephone

In sending a message by the wire telegraph the current flows over the line wire when the key is pressed. When the key is released the current stops. The circuit is made and broken for every dot or dash. This we may call an interrupted current. Now we have seen that the attempt to invent a wire telephone using an interrupted current failed. While one is talking over the wire telephone a current (alternating) must be flowing over the line wire. The sound of the voice does not make and break the circuit, but changes the strength of the current. This alternating current is wonderfully sensitive. It can vary in the rate at which it alternates or the number of alternations per second to correspond to sound of every pitch. It varies in strength to correspond to all the variations in the voice, and reproduces in the receiver not merely the words that are spoken but the quality of the voice, so that the voice of a friend can be recognized by telephone almost as well as if talking face to face.

The same things are true of the wireless telegraph and telephone. Instead of an electric current, let us say "a stream of electric waves." Then we may say of the wireless everything that we have said of the wire telegraph and telephone. In sending a message by wireless telegraph the stream of electric waves flows when the key is pressed and stops when the key is released. We have an interrupted stream of electric waves. But an interrupted stream of waves cannot be used for a wireless telephone any more than an interrupted current can be used for a wire-telephone. There must be a constantly flowing stream of electric waves, and these waves must be changed in strength and form by the sound of the voice. Fig. 111 shows a wireless-telephone receiver in which light is used to carry the message. The light acts on the receiver in such a way as to reproduce the sound.