Another valuable use of wireless is in carrying on the work of lighthouses and lightships during snowstorms or dense fogs, which the light cannot penetrate. So far not much has been done in this direction, but the French Government have decided to establish wireless lighthouses on the islands outside the port of Brest, and also at Havre. Automatic transmitting apparatus will be used, sending out signals every few seconds, and working for periods of about thirty hours without attention.
The improvement in the conditions of ocean travel wrought by wireless telegraphy is very remarkable. The days when a vessel, on passing out of sight of land, entered upon a period of utter isolation, is gone for ever. Unless it strays far from all recognized trade routes, a ship fitted with a wireless installation is never isolated; and with the rapidly increasing number of high-power stations both on land and sea, it soon will be almost impossible for a vessel to find a stretch of ocean beyond the reach of wave-borne messages. The North Atlantic Ocean is specially remarkable for perfection of wireless communication. For the first 250 miles or so after leaving British shores, liners are within reach of various coast stations, and beyond this Poldhu takes up the work and maintains communication up to about mid-Atlantic. On passing beyond the reach of Poldhu, liners come within range of other Marconi stations at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Cape Race, Newfoundland, so that absolutely uninterrupted communication is maintained throughout the voyage. On many liners a small newspaper is published daily, in which are given brief accounts of the most striking events of the previous day, together with Stock Exchange quotations and market prices. This press news is sent out during the night from Poldhu and Cape Cod. During the whole voyage messages may be transmitted from ship to shore, or from shore to ship, with no more difficulty, as far as the public are concerned, than in sending an ordinary inland telegram.
The transmitting ranges of ship installations vary greatly, the range of the average ocean liner being about 250 miles. Small ships come as low as 50 miles, while a few exceptional vessels have night ranges up to 1200 or even 2500 miles. Although an outward-bound vessel is almost always within range of some high-power shore station, it is evident that it soon must reach a point beyond which it is unable to communicate directly with the shore. This difficulty is overcome by a system of relaying from ship to ship. The vessel wishing to speak with the shore hands on its message to some other vessel nearer to land or with a longer range, and this ship sends forward the message to a shore station if one is within its reach, and if not to a third vessel, which completes the transmission.
The necessity for wireless installations on all sea-going vessels has been brought home to us in startling fashion on several occasions during the last few years. Time after time we have read thrilling accounts of ocean disasters in which wireless has come to the rescue in the most wonderful way. A magnificent liner, with its precious human freight, steams majestically out of harbour, and ploughs its way out into the waste of waters. In mid-ocean comes disaster, swift and awful, and the lives of all on board are in deadly peril. Agonized eyes sweep the horizon, but no sail is in sight, and succour seems hopeless. But on the deck of that vessel is a small, unpretentious cabin, and at a desk in that cabin sits a young fellow with strange-looking instruments before him. At the first tidings of disaster he presses a key, and out across the waters speed electric waves bearing the wireless cry for help, “S.O.S.,” incessantly repeated. Far away, on another liner, is a similar small cabin, and its occupant is busy with messages of everyday matters. Suddenly, in the midst of his work, comes the call from the stricken vessel, and instantly all else is forgotten. No matter what the message in hand, it must wait, for lives are in danger. Quickly the call is answered, the position of the doomed ship received, and the captain is informed. A few orders are hurriedly given, the ship’s course is changed, and away she steams to the rescue, urged on by the full power of her engines. In an hour or two she arrives alongside, boats are lowered, and passengers and crew are snatched from death and placed in safety. This scene, with variations, has been enacted many times, and never yet has wireless failed to play its part. It is only too true that in some instances many lives have been lost, but in these cases it is necessary to remember that without wireless every soul on board might have gone down. The total number of lives already saved by wireless is estimated at about 5000, and of these some 3000 have been saved in the Atlantic.
Ship aerials are carried from one mast to another, as high up as possible. The transmitting and receiving apparatus is much the same as in land stations, so that it need not be described. In addition, most liners carry a large induction coil and a suitable battery, so that distress signals can be transmitted even when the ordinary apparatus is rendered useless by the failure of the current supply. Most of the wireless systems are represented amongst ship installations, but the great majority of vessels have either Marconi or Telefunken apparatus.
Every wireless station, whether on ship or on shore, has a separate call-signal, consisting of three letters. For instance, Clifden is MFT, Poldhu MPD, Norddeich KAV, s.s. Lusitania MFA, and H.M.S. Dreadnought BAU. Glace Bay, GB, and the Eiffel Tower, FL, have two letters only. In order to avoid confusion, different countries have different combinations of letters assigned to them exclusively, and these are allotted to the various ship and shore stations. For example, Great Britain has all combinations beginning with B, G, and M; France all combinations beginning with F, and also the combinations UAA to UMZ; while the United States is entitled to use all combinations beginning with N and W, and the combinations KIA to KZZ. There are also special signals to indicate nationality, for use by ships, British being indicated by - - — -, Japanese by — - — -, and so on.
Wireless telegraphy apparently has a useful future in railway work. In spite of the great perfection of present-day railway signalling, no railway company is able to avoid occasional accidents. Some of these accidents are due to circumstances which no precautions can guard against entirely, such, for instance, as the sudden breakage of some portion of the mechanism of the train itself. In many cases, however, the accident is caused by some oversight on the part of the signalman or the engine-driver. Probably the great majority of such accidents are not due to real carelessness or inattention to duty, but to unaccountable freaks of the brain, through which some little detail, never before forgotten, is overlooked completely until too late. We all are liable to these curious mental lapses, but happily in most cases these do not lead to disaster of any kind. The ever-present possibility of accidents brought about in this way is recognized fully by railway authorities, and every effort is made to devise mechanism which will safeguard a train in case of failure of the human element. The great weakness of the ordinary railway system is that there is no reliable means of communicating with the driver of a train except by the fixed signals, so that when a train has passed one set of signals it is generally beyond the reach of a message until it arrives at the next set. On the enterprising Lackawanna Railroad, in the United States, an attempt has been made to remove this defect by means of wireless telegraphy, and the experiment has been remarkably successful. Wireless communication between moving passenger trains and certain stations along the route has been established, and the system is being rapidly developed.
The wireless equipment of the stations is of the usual type, and does not call for comment, but the apparatus on the trains is worth mention. The aerial, which must be low on account of bridges and tunnels, consists of rectangles of wire fixed at a height of 18 inches above the roof of each car. These separate aerials are connected together by a wire running to a small operating room containing a set of Marconi apparatus, and situated at the end of one of the cars. The earth connexion is made to the track rails, and the current is taken from the dynamos used to supply the train with electric light. With this equipment messages have been transmitted and received while the train was running at the rate of 70 miles an hour, and distances up to 125 miles have been covered. During a severe storm in the early part of last year the telegraph and telephone lines along the railroad broke down, but uninterrupted communication was maintained by wireless, and the operations of the relief gangs and the snow-ploughs were directed by this means. For emergency signalling this system is likely to prove of enormous importance. If signals are set wrongly, through some misunderstanding, and a train which should have been held up is passed forward into danger, it can be stopped by a wireless message in time to prevent an accident. Again, if a train has a breakdown, or if it sticks fast in a snow-drift, its plight and its exact position can be signalled to the nearest station, so that help may be sent without delay. The possibilities of the system in fact are almost unlimited, and it seems not unlikely that wireless telegraphy will revolutionize the long-distance railway travelling of the future.
CHAPTER XXII
ELECTROPLATING AND ELECTROTYPING
In our chapter on the accumulator or storage cell we saw that a current of electricity has the power of decomposing certain liquids; that is to say, it is able to split them up into their component parts. This power has given rise to the important art of electroplating and electrotyping. Electroplating is the process of depositing a coating of a rarer metal, such as gold, silver, or nickel, upon the surface of baser or commoner metals; and electrotyping is the copying of casts, medals, types, and other similar objects. The fact that metals could be deposited by the decomposition of a solution by a current was known in the early days of the voltaic cell, but no one seems to have paid much attention to it. An Italian chemist published in 1805 an account of his success in coating two silver medals with gold, and some thirty years later Bessemer transformed lead castings into fairly presentable ornaments by coating them with copper, but commercial electroplating may be said to have begun about 1840, when an Englishman named Elkington took out a patent for the process. Since then the processes of electroplating and electrotyping have rapidly come more and more into use, until to-day they are practised on a vast scale, giving employment to thousands.