A fortnight passed. Each anxious day young Falconer worked hard in the splendidly-equipped experimental laboratory in that hive of wireless industry at Chelmsford, where radio apparatus of all kinds was being constructed for every civilised nation—that triumph of the Italian inventor who gave to the world a means of instant and reliable communication unknown before those epoch-making experiments on Monte Nero, outside the sun-blanched town of Leghorn. Truly the science of radio-telegraphy has made rapid strides since the days of the “coherer,” until now, after the war, it is the most advanced in our human civilisation, and at the same time full of romance. Not a month passes but something new is discovered in that high-built, well-knit laboratory, where daily the keenest brains of wireless experimenters are at work devising, testing, and too often scrapping new instruments, new circuits, and new devices in order to improve and render less complicated both the ordinary wireless by Morse, and that modern marvel, the wireless telephone.
The world has yet to learn what it owes to wireless. Little does it dream of its aid to commerce in every quarter of the globe; how much of the news it reads at its breakfast-table had been flashed through the ether for thousands of miles, or how every hour it outstrips the choked-up and behind-the-times submarine cable system.
Geoffrey Falconer was very sorely puzzled.
But why was that mysterious signal unheard by others? Further, by what method was it being transmitted? Being acquainted with every method of transmission, he guessed, after a number of tests, that it must be automatic. One day he took his improved microphone amplifier to the works at Chelmsford, and attaching it to the very complicated apparatus designed for the reception of signals automatically transmitted—a piece of apparatus far too technical to here describe—he sat at a quarter past seven awaiting the usual signal.
With him were two of the research staff, both as deeply interested in the mystery as himself, though upon their high-up aerial wires they had been unable to detect the signals in question.
“Hulloa!” cried Boyd, a fair, clean-shaven man of thirty-five, who was a well-known radio-engineer. “There she goes!”
The receiving apparatus gave a short quick buzz, thrice repeated, and then there was silence again.
Eagerly Falconer took the record which had been made, and placing it in another small box, adjusted the head-’phones, and depressing a key, allowed it to revolve slowly. The message became distinctly readable!
They were figures—the numerals 4519, thrice repeated. It was that same code-message which the genial Glover had sent from the liner in mid-Atlantic! What could it mean?
Two facts were now proved—that the amplifier, as improved by Geoffrey, was a supersensitive instrument, which would, no doubt, have a great future before it, and bring its inventor both money and fame in the world of radio-telegraphy. Secondly, that some curious mystery lay behind the appearance of Mr. George Glover in London society.