JACK HEATON, WIRELESS OPERATOR

“‘BOYS, YOU HAVE DONE YOUR DUTY. NOW SAVE YOURSELVES’”

JACK HEATON

WIRELESS OPERATOR

A. FREDERICK COLLINS

Author of “Inventing for Boys,” “Handicraft for Boys,”
“The Boys’ Book of Submarines,” etc.

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
BY R. EMMETT OWEN

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Frederick A. Stokes Company

The Sprague Publishing Company

DONALD DELMAR ZEITLER

CONTENTS
I	[How I Learned Wireless]
II	[My First Job as an Operator]
III	[When the “Andalusian” Went Down]
IV	[Catching Seals by Wireless]
V	[My Adventures in the Tropics]
VI	[Working with Marconi]
VII	[A Government Operator at Arlington]
VIII	[Aboard a Warship at Vera Cruz]
IX	[On a Submarine Chaser]
X	[A Signalman on a Submarine]
XI	[With the Field Artillery in France]
XII	[Mustered Out]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[“‘Boys, you have done your duty. Now save yourselves’”]
[“‘The Republic is sinking and sending out C Q D’s’”]
[We were catching seals by wireless!]
[“‘I whipped out my gun just in time to spot a couple of snipers’”]
[“A bright flash of blue fire shot up through the hole”]
[Our torpedo passed through the raider’s hull and exploded inside]
[“The airplane signaled down to us in code”]
[“But for every one the boches sent we put over two or three”]

JACK HEATON,

WIRELESS OPERATOR

CHAPTER I—HOW I LEARNED WIRELESS

It happened out at sea about five hundred miles as wireless waves fly from Montclair. But perhaps you don’t know where Montclair is and maybe you don’t particularly care, but as it is my home town I must tell you about it. First, it’s in New Jersey a short way from South Orange, where Mr. Edison, the great inventor, has his laboratory, and about twelve miles from New York City. So you see it is pretty favorably located.

If you were a stranger going through the place you’d have been surprised to see the webs of wires strung around every other house in town and on first sight you might have taken them for telegraph or telephone lines, or as I once heard a man remark to my father, “They look like lines on which to hang the family wash.” But, nay, nay, these wires, on the contrary, were not used for any such commonplace purpose but they were, instead, aerials put up by wireless boys for sending and receiving messages.

Just about half of the fellows in our town at that time were wireless bugs and they ranged anywhere from thirteen to nineteen years of age, though every once in a while a full fledged man would be found with an outfit. Some of the fellows had elaborate equipments with aerials containing upwards of a thousand feet of wire and with them they could send messages to distances of a hundred miles or so and receive them from powerful stations a thousand miles away.

I don’t know who started the wireless game in Montclair, but I do know that it was a long time after I was exposed to the wireless germ that it took and I was interested enough to listen in to the news that was flashed out by ship and shore stations. Nearly all fellows begin wireless by seeing some of their pals monkeying with the apparatus, and no wonder, for wireless has a kind of fascination about it that makes a deep appeal to not only boys but men.

At that time I was fifteen years old and my hobby was printing. I had quite an outfit, including a 5 x 7 self-inking press, a good layout of type, cases and everything. As I was a boy of action and wanted quick results I couldn’t see this idea at all of constantly adjusting a detector, working the slider of a tuning coil back and forth, looking as solemn as an owl and keeping as silent as a clam.

There was a friend of mine named Bob Carteret who had the top floor of the garage on his place and he had one of the best amateur outfits in town. A lot of us fellows used to make his operating room a hang-out because we could get into and out of it without disturbing any one or getting called down by anybody. Bob was a mighty good sport even if he did wear spectacles and talk like a college professor and he was always willing to let a fellow listen in if he could read Morse, while for the benefit of those like myself who didn’t know the code he would tell us what the fellows in our own neighborhood were saying or what the operators down in Virginia, over in Ohio, up in New York State, or out in the Atlantic were sending.

It was interesting enough to pick bits of news right out of the air, so to speak, and I noticed that the grown-up folks were always mighty keen to hear any wireless news that might happen to come Bob’s way. In those good old days when amateur wireless was young any fellow could set up his own station, use whatever wavelength he wanted to send with, and blab any news that chanced to come his way; but all this was changed a few years later when the government found that too many amateurs were abusing these privileges. To give them a chance it made every one who operated or owned a wireless station register it, gave him a call letter, limited the sending range of his apparatus, had him use waves of a certain length for sending, and made it an offense for him to give out any news which he might receive. And oh, the wail that went up all over the United States from the amateurs!

I went over to Bob’s one evening after dinner—we always have dinner in the evening in Montclair—and as usual there was Bob sitting at his table listening in. Charlie Langdon, Howard Brice and Johnny James were there and they were all leaning over him looking worried.

“Hello, fellows,” I sang out as I opened the door.

“Shut up,” hissed Howard, while Johnny punched me in the ribs with his elbow and Charlie showed his butter teeth and flapped his open hand, which in kid language means keep still.

I sat down sulkily, for no self-respecting boy that can box the way I used to wants to be told to shut up, get a poke in the ribs and the signal to keep his face closed when he has only said, “Hello, fellows.” After a minute or two my curiosity bristled up for I must needs know what was going on. I looked at Bob. His face was a little longer than usual, his eyes were glassy and stared hard and he kept adjusting the detector nervously.

“What’s it all about, Howard?” I whispered in his ear.

Say, you’d think I’d committed a crime the way he scowled at me. Then he deigned to make a whispered reply.

“The Republic is sinking and is sending out C Q D’s.”

I could feel my heart stop beating, the blood leave my head, and my body get rigid, and it’s just about the same kind of a feeling that comes over a fellow when he is on a ship that is going down, as I have since learned.

Other ships were answering the Republic’s distress signals and were headed for her but they were a long, long way off and it seemed very doubtful if they could reach her in time. The Republic’s operator kept on sending C Q D’s and then her latitude and longitude. I stayed at Bob’s station until dad came after me, which was about midnight. At first he was pretty sore, but when he found out what had kept me he relented a little.

Well, the next day we wireless fellows—I had been initiated—did not take a very keen interest in our school work, for when you know a big ship crowded with human freight is sinking you don’t care much whether school keeps or not. As soon as school was out we were all at it again and then after fifty-two hours of hoping against hope, and during all of which time Jack Binns, the first wireless hero, had stuck to his key on the ill-fated ship, help reached her and by so doing his duty sixteen hundred lives were saved.

“‘THE REPUBLIC IS SINKING AND IS SENDING OUT C Q D’S’”

Bob took the receivers from his head and laid them on the table. I tell you we were an excited crowd and it had us going for fair. We all felt as if we had really something to do with it, instead of merely getting the news at first hand. It was indeed a thrilling piece of business, and nothing more was needed for me to get into the wireless game except an outfit.

Now I don’t know whether you know anything about wireless, but I will say here that while you can only send over short distances with a good sized sending apparatus, you can receive over quite long distances with a cheap receiver if you have a fairly decent aerial, by which I mean one that is high enough above the ground and has a long enough stretch, and, of course, it must be properly insulated. Not only this, but a sending apparatus of any size costs much money and takes a lot of current to work it. On the other hand a receiving apparatus can be bought for a few dollars and can be used without any current at all, though it gives louder signals when a dry cell is used.

Just as soon as my wireless pals found I’d got the bug they all jumped in and helped me rig up the aerial. We strung it up between a tree at the back end of our lot and the gable at the side of the house so that it was about fifteen feet high at one end, thirty feet high at the other end and fifty feet long—a very respectable aerial.

We ran the leading in wire to the window of my printing office. Outside the window frame we screwed a lightning switch. Next we fastened the rat-tail of the aerial to one of the middle posts, and from the other lower post we ran a wire down to the ground and into the basement, where we clamped it on to the water pipe, and this made the ground. This done we connected the other end of the switch with a wire and ran it through an insulator in the window sash so that it could be fixed to the instruments when I got them.

“Won’t those wires attract the lightning, Jack?” my mother asked, eyeing it dubiously after the aerial was all up.

I was just about to tell her I had never thought of that, when Bob jumped in and explained it all as intelligently as though he were Sir Oliver Lodge lecturing on wireless before the Royal Society.

“You see, Mrs. Heaton,” he began, “an aerial when it is properly put up like this one really protects a house from lightning just as a lightning rod does, only better. Before a storm the air is charged with electricity and as the aerial is connected with the ground through that switch up there, the electricity as fast as it is formed is carried to the ground and this prevents enough of it from gathering to make a lightning stroke.”

Mother’s eyes brightened hopefully as she looked on this smart boy.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” she said, and went into the house perfectly satisfied that I was in good company.

The next move on my part was to get the receiving apparatus. This consisted of a detector, a tuning coil, a dry cell, a potentiometer, and a pair of head telephone receivers or head-phones as they are called for short. Bob helped me to make the detector because he said he could make a better detector than I could buy. When I got everything ready to hook up I was terribly nervous for I could hardly wait to try them out.

I had a diagram that Charlie gave me which showed exactly how the instruments were connected up, and as I wanted to be able to say “I did it myself,” and without the advice or criticism of any of the fellows, I started to work on it as soon as I got home. I used my imposing table to set the apparatus on and it was not long before I had it all wired up as per the diagram.

Verily I was a proud youth when I put on the head-phone, adjusted the detector and moved the slider of the tuning coil back and forth. I knew just how to do it because I had seen the other fellows make these same adjustments a thousand times.

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” boasts Glendower in Shakespeare’s play of “Henry IV.”

“Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?” retorts Hotspur.

That just about states my case, for I could adjust the detector and run the slider back and forth on the tuning coil and so can any one else, but to be able to get a message is quite another matter. But then perhaps, as I thought, no one was sending, so I telephoned over to Bob and asked him to send something and to send it slow. I went back to my receiver but try as I would I couldn’t get a thing. Gee, but it was discouraging.

In about fifteen minutes Bob popped in and by this time I was right glad to see him. He looked over the apparatus, not like an amateur but like a professional operator, and saw to it that all of the wires were tight.

“You’ve got it connected up all right and we ought to get it. Somebody ought to be sending something.”

He put on the receiver and listened, but to no purpose. He looked perplexed. As he was listening and trying to adjust the receiver, he glanced out of the window.

“You’re a great operator, you are,” he said with a rueful countenance; “how do you suppose you’re going to get anything when you haven’t got your lightning switch closed?”

Well, from that day to this when anything goes wrong I always look first to see if all the switches are closed and the connections are tight.

“Ollie Nichols of South Orange is telling Eddie Powers to meet him at the Y.M.C.A., and have a swim,” he said with a grin.

Then he clapped the receiver on my head and I heard the signals coming in as plain as day, only I didn’t know what the fellows who were sending were talking about.

To make a long, and for me a most pleasant, story short I learned the Continental Morse Code which was used by all Marconi stations and when I got so I could read the kid stations in and around Montclair, I began to branch out and pick up the commercial stations.

In those early days, although it was only ten years ago, the regular operators didn’t send as fast as they do now and this made it quite easy to read them. It was not many weeks before I could double discount Bob on receiving, but he was always a shark on the theory of the thing. What he didn’t know about electric waves, electric oscillations, disruptive discharges, tuning open and closed circuits and all the rest of that deep stuff was, to my way of thinking, not worth knowing. Bob lived up to his reputation for he graduated from Princeton, got a Ph.D. degree, became a Captain in the Signal Corps of the Army and is now somewhere in France.

I was quite well satisfied for a long while just to listen in, but finally the novelty of the thing wore off and I felt that I must needs send also. My first transmitter was made up of a one-inch spark coil, a Leyden jar condenser, a tuning coil, a key and a lot of dry cells. As I was now in possession of a complete station, when the other kid stations wanted me they used to signal J K H and these remained my call letters until the government took a hand in wireless. Thus it was I landed at last fairly and squarely in the amateur class.

My wireless proclivities were getting the better of my scholastic training and my folks were quite worried over and more than tired of it. So one sweet day dad and I had a long talk and he did the most of it.

“Wireless,” he said gently but firmly, “is a good horse if you don’t ride it to death, but that is just what you are doing. There isn’t a minute of the time you are in the house, when you are not eating or sleeping, that you haven’t got that pair of receivers glued to your ears.”

“But, dad, next to Bob, I get the highest marks in physics in my class and I’m nearly a year younger than he is too. Why I can tell the prof things he doesn’t know about the emission, propagation and reception of electromagnetic waves,” I enthused, pulling off some of that heavy, theoretical stuff of Bob’s.

“That is all very well,” he came back, “and I’m glad you can talk so understandingly, at least to your father, but those big words are not getting you anywhere in algebra and that’s the point at issue.”

Then suddenly veering the subject he asked, “How far can you send a message with that coil apparatus there?”

“A couple of miles in daylight if the atmosphere is right and about twice that far at night if there is not too much interference. You see—”

“How much would an apparatus cost that had power enough to send say twenty miles?” he broke in.

“About fifty dollars, I guess,” I made reply.

“Then let’s strike a bargain. It’s two months till school is out and if you will bend your efforts and pass everything—everything, mind you—I’ll see to it that you have a sending outfit that’s worth something.”

“Dad, you’re all right,” I ejaculated, shaking his hand warmly.

“And you’re all right, too, Jack, if you’ll only speed up in your studies a bit.”

The result was that both dad and I made good. He was pleased with my work and I was tickled most to death with my new half-kilowatt transmitter. But that is what you call buying an education for a fellow twice. It’s a shabby trick to work on one’s folks and I’ve often thought about it since. The only way I can ease off my conscience is by considering that this mild kind of bribery has been worked by nearly all fond parents in one way or another ever since the world began.

Hardly had I installed my new transmitter than summer was upon us and we were rushing off for our annual vacation at the seashore. Not far from Asbury Park, where we were to spend the heated months, there was a Marconi station. I had a brilliant idea and to the end of trying it out, I made a box about four inches high, six inches wide and twelve inches long with a good lid to it and fitted it with hinges, clasps and a handle.

I arranged my receiving apparatus so that it would all go snugly into the box—that is, I made a portable receiver of it. Then I got a spool of No. 18 copper wire, three or four porcelain knob insulators, a screw driver and a pair of pliers, and I was ready for business.

When we were inducted in our hotel, which was to be our home for the next couple of months, I strung the wire lengthwise across the roof, supporting it on the insulators. I brought the free end of the wire down the side of the hotel and into my room which was on the sixth floor. I connected the aerial wire to one of the binding posts of my portable receiver and the other binding post to the water pipe in the bath room. Talk about messages! Why I got them from all over New Jersey when the big stations were working.

Some one told the manager (I’ll bet it was the elevator boy I had had the run-in with the first day I rode up with him) and he nearly spoilt everything, for he made me take the wire down. But I foxed him. I hooked the aerial end to a brass bed and with this arrangement I could get a couple of the nearest big stations, but of course not so clear and loud. Sometimes I could even pick up a coastwise steamer which carried the United Wireless Company’s apparatus and on two or three occasions I had the pleasure of listening to a conversation between two transatlantic liners. I suppose if the manager of the hotel had known about it, he’d have charged me extra for using the bed as an aerial.

It showed me, though, that there were great possibilities in wireless and that we may yet be able to talk with the inhabitants of Mars. I wanted to get into wireless deeper and I did.

CHAPTER II—MY FIRST JOB AS AN OPERATOR

Just before the Christmas holidays my father, who was the New York manager of the Singer Crude Oil Engine Company, told mother and me that he had to make a business trip to Nicaragua.

There was nothing exciting in this announcement for dad went off on business trips quite often, but when he said that he would take us with him and we’d go by steamer I immediately sat up and took notice, for I had wanted to make a sea voyage ever since I could remember.

It may seem a little queer but although I lived almost within sight of the old Atlantic and picked up messages right along from coast liners, the only trip I had ever made was on a little steam launch that takes unwary pleasure victims from Asbury Park outbound toward Europe for about ten miles, or until every one’s gizzard is turned wrong-side-out (much to the delight of the fishes) and back again.

I said every one was sea-sick nigh unto death but as a matter of fact there were just three human beings aboard the Snail that were able to step ashore like sober folks and walk a fairly straight line. I don’t want to do any bragging but these sole survivors of mal-de-mer were the captain and the engineer, who made up the crew, and yours truly.

To make a real ocean voyage on a sure enough steamer meant something more to me than just a sea-going trip, for a law had been passed some time before making it compulsory for all ocean passenger vessels to have a wireless outfit aboard and I was just bugs to see a regular ship set in operation.

For the next few days everything around home was a hurry-up place—like going away for the summer—and I was mighty glad when at last we took the Erie (not weary) railroad for Jersey City, where the Pan-American Line had its docks. Once there, a couple of porters relieved us of our numerous pieces of hand baggage, and trailing along in the rear of dad and mom, I came aboard feeling like a duke.

After we were shown our staterooms by the steward I made a bee-line for the wireless room, but found it locked, the operator not yet having put in an appearance. To kill time till he came I went up on the hurricane deck, that is the upper deck, to take a look at the aerial.

It was formed of a couple of parallel wires about 200 feet long suspended between the masts and insulated from them by strain insulators of the kind that was then known as the Navy type. I was standing close to one of the funnels looking up at the aerial, which seemed to me to be a middling one—I had seen better and worse in Montclair—when all of a sudden there was a terrific noise set up and for a second I failed to cohere—that is I was nearly scared stiff. In an instant my jigger was right again, for it was only the ship’s whistle blowing its deep throated blast to let those who had come aboard to say good-by to their friends who were sailing, know that it was time to go ashore, and to those ashore who wanted to take the boat know that they had better get a move on them if they expected to make it.

When I got back to the wireless room there was quite a collection of people crowded around the little window, but whether for the purpose of sending messages or out of curiosity I didn’t know. I stood about as much chance of getting up to that window as a fellow has of getting on a subway express at Brooklyn Bridge during the rush hour.

I went away in disgust and didn’t go back again until we had sailed down the river, passed through the Narrows and had dropped the pilot out at sea.

Suddenly I heard the ze—ze—zip—zip—zippy snap of the sparks of the transmitter as the operator began to send, and I rushed madly to the wireless room. As I ran down the passageway I read –··· ·–· – that is B R T, B R T, B R T, at intervals of every two or three minutes; B R T was the call letter of some shore station that the operator was trying to get, but without my book, which gave the call letters of the different ship and shore stations, I couldn’t tell which one it was.

You know, of course, that when a vessel wants to talk to a station either on ship or shore the first thing the operator does is to listen-in—to make sure that he will not interfere with messages that are being exchanged between other stations within his range. If the ether isn’t too busy he then sends the call letter of the station he wants.

On reaching the wireless room I found a bigger crowd congregated around the window than ever for the zip—zippy crackle of the sparks as they broke down the air between the spark-gap electrodes had attracted the curious even as honey attracts insects of the Musca domestica family, i.e., houseflies, and I couldn’t get within six feet of it.

There was a short lull while the operator looked over a message which a little man with red hair and a pepper and salt suit had written out. When the operator started to send again I read off the name of our ship, the state of the weather and the number of words he intended to send, all of which was in accordance with the regular routine prescribed by the rules and regulations of the company for governing communications by wireless between ships and shore stations. The message ran like this:

For fear you may not know the Morse code which was used by all coastwise steamers in those early days, I will do it into English for you.

Transcriber’s note: The code shown is American Morse Code, which differs from the more familiar International Morse Code in use today.

S G, which I afterwards looked up, was, I found, a station at Sea Gate which was on the coast. Vinalos was the name of our ship. Fine meant the state of the weather. Fifteen indicated the number of words the message contained.

I laughed at the man who forgot, but nobody else laughed because there was probably not one among them who knew the difference between a binding post and an electric wave.

All of that afternoon I read the outgoing messages, but I felt I was losing something by not getting what was coming in. Then a brilliant idea struck me and I immediately proceeded to put it into execution with the result that it almost electrocuted me.

I took out my little portable receiving set, hooked a wire to the detector and the other end to the electric light fixture for a ground which, from what I had read about ship stations, I had reason to believe made a connection with the steel hull of the ship. Being so close to the 2 kilowatt (about 2½ horsepower) transmitter, one side of the spark-gap of which also made connection with the hull, I hadn’t the slightest doubt but that I could receive without an aerial and I certainly did, but the kind wasn’t right.

No sooner had I put on my head-phones and my fingers on the adjusting screw of the detector than zip, zum, bang, boom, and I received a terrific shock that lifted me clear off the edge of my bunk; I hung suspended in mid-air ’tween decks (or so it seemed) and to give verisimilitude to the levitation act, I recoiled like a 12-inch gun and hit the floor with a dull thud. I was glad the man I laughed at because he forgot, was not there to laugh at the fellow who didn’t know.

When I had fully come to and was able to use my thinker again I knocked the wire off of the electric light fixture and then proceeded to examine my receiver to see if anything had been damaged. Beyond burning off the point of my detector there was no scathe done, and I overhauled it and put the instrument back in its box.

My next move was to see the operator and hold some small wireless talk with him. It was now late in the afternoon and when I got back it overjoyed me to find that the crowd who hungered to penetrate the mystery of sending messages without wires had fathomed its very depths and departed, that is, all except one young couple who were from Missouri, according to the passenger list, and of course they must needs be shown.

The moment I saw the operator’s face I set him down for one of those fresh young fellows you meet everywhere and I did not miss my guess. Now you would hardly believe it, but it is nevertheless true, that there are a few operators who think it smart and a great joke to tell land-lubbers anything but the truth whenever they are questioned about wireless.

“What I can’t understand,” said the young woman, “is how you can send out a wireless message when the wind is blowing so hard.”

If the operator had been even a 14-carat gentleman he would have told her that when he works the key a low pressure current of electricity is broken up into dots and dashes representing letters and that this intermittent current flowing through the coil of the transmitter is changed into high frequency oscillations by the spark; the oscillations then surge through the aerial wire and their energy is emitted from the aerial in the form of electric waves. These electric waves are exactly the same as light waves, except that they are very much longer, and both are transmitted by, in and through the ether. Hence the wind, which is air in motion, has nothing at all to do with it.

This would have been the real scientific explanation of how a message is sent and while it would, more than likely, have been as clear as mud to her young inquiring mind, still if she could not grasp the true explanation of how it works it would have been her misfortune and not the operator’s fault. See?

But did he tell the lady straight? You could have told from his physiog that he would not. Instead he went on at great length and framed up a story of how the wind had once blown a message he had sent far out of its course and then suddenly veering round it blew it back again and he caught his own message several minutes later when he was listening-in for the reply. This he claimed, with great seriousness was due to the low power of his instruments and a fouled aerial.

“Are you having any trouble now on account of the wind?” continued the young woman deeply interested.

“None at all, because you see I am using a four horsepower spark and I have just had my aerial sandpapered and oiled and the waves slip off without the slightest difficulty.”

This little speech gave me another shock, but I had a third one coming and forthwith got it.

“How are they coming in?” I asked, leaning against the window after the couple had gone.

“What do you mean?” he questioned as he looked at me through half closed eyes in a way I didn’t fancy.

“Why the messages?”

“Through the window,” he returned shortly, and went back to his key.

I stuck around the window and took a good look at the instruments which to my way of thinking weren’t much, in fact a lot of fellows in Montclair had outfits that put his way in the shade except that they were not as powerful. I couldn’t see why he was so swelled on himself.

He began calling again and after he had put through his message I repeated it out loud as though I was talking to myself, just to let him know that I knew.

He took off his head-phones, came over to the window and smiled a thin-lipped smile which was anything but friendly.

“So you’re another one of those wireless kids, eh?”

“Yes, I have a pretty good wireless set. I live in Montclair and very often I hear Key West,” I told him with some pride.

The way he warmed up to me was something wonderful and in all my experience as an operator I have never met another of exactly his wave length.

“You kids,” he said, pointing his long bony finger at my right eye, “make life a nightmare for us professionals. Every kid that knows how to splice a wire seems to be crazy to send messages. Ninety-nine out of a hundred know nothing of wireless and their signals are simply a jumble of sparks.

“A kid has no business learning wireless at all. I can tune out amateur low power stations, but they are always breaking in in the middle of a message. I haven’t got any use for a wireless kid. So hotfoot it and don’t hang around here any more.”

This was too much for even a fellow with a cast-iron nerve like mine, so I turned on my heel, said sore-head under my breath and took a walk on the promenade deck. He was the first professional operator I had ever met and I was certainly disappointed in the way he treated a brother operator. I wondered then if all professional operators had his kind of a grouch and if so, I didn’t want to be one of them.

Not to be out-generaled I thought I’d try one more scheme and that was to use a couple of pieces of wire five or six feet long for the aerial and ground, hook them on to the detector of my receiver, fix the free end of the aerial over the window and lay the free end of the ground wire on the floor. In this way there would be no direct metal connection between his transmitter and my receiver.

The waves from his set were so powerful that they easily bridged the gap and I listened-in whenever I wanted to and knew everybody’s business on board all the way down to Realjo. But I kept away from the wireless room and that operator. Before we landed I found out from the second officer that the operator was only a substitute for the regular one and that it was the second trip he had ever made.

After a stay of a couple of weeks in Realjo we started back for New York on the Almirante. I didn’t know whether to tackle making friends with the operator or not. I had swallowed a pretty bitter wireless pill on the way down and didn’t care about repeating the dose.

The second day out I ventured close enough to the instrument room to see what the outfit looked like and to size up the operator in charge.

He was a big fellow with a full rounded face and every little while he would whistle a popular air which fitted in nicely with the bright sunshine that flooded the room. At the same time he would listen-in and finally he sent O. K., which in the wireless code means that he had heard the operator of the distant station who was calling him and that he was ready to take his message.

Of course I couldn’t tell what was coming in but I was aching to put those head-phones on just once. When he had finished writing out the message he put it in an envelope and started to leave the room. Spotting me standing by he beamed pleasantly.

“Oh! I say, boy, I wonder if you would be so kind and condescending as to take this message to the Captain? Some other messages are likely to come in and I don’t want to leave my post.”

Would I carry a message to the Captain? Why I’d carry one to the King of Abyssinia for a pleasant word from any professional operator. I felt that there was my chance to get a stand-in with his royal highness, the wireless man.

After delivering the message to the Captain I returned with alacrity to the window of the wireless room. The operator loosened up but I didn’t tell him I was one of those fellows too. I had learned at first hand that professional operators hadn’t any use for wireless kids and that the only way to be friends with one was to be as dumb as a clam as far as wireless was concerned.

This scheme worked out fine for after some talk he asked me of his own accord if I’d like to take a look at the apparatus. He opened the door and told me to “come right in” although on a card tacked on the wall in plain sight was printed this legend:

Service Regulations for Operators.

(1) The instrument room is strictly private. No strangers are allowed on the premises without a signed permit from the Managing Director.

And this was followed by a dozen or more other rules and regulations.

When I got inside the room the operator, whose name was Bathwick, began pointing out which part of the apparatus was the sender and which made up the receiver; this was the key; that the sending tuning coil, over here the condenser; under the table the transformer; on the wall the spark-gap; and altogether these make up the transmitter. This the crystal detector, the potentiometer, the tuning coil, the variable condenser and the head-phones make up the receiver and, finally the aerial switch, or throwover switch as it is called, the purpose of which is to enable the operator to connect the aerial with the transmitter or the receiver, depending on whether he wants to send or to receive.

I acted as if I had never seen a wireless set before; all went well until he had finished and then I let the cat out of the bag. He had a peculiar kind of a loose-coupled tuning coil that I had never seen before and I asked him how it was wound. He grinned at me with his big mouth and blue eyes and put out his open hand, palm side up.

“Put it there, pal,” he said. “I was a wireless kid myself once.” We shook hands and it put me next to the fact that all professional operators are not alike and at the same time it gave me a pass to the wireless room whenever I wanted it. I almost lived there the rest of the voyage.

Harry—I mean Bathwick—and I got so thick we began calling each other by our first names. He let me listen-in whenever I wanted to, and then after telling me all about the service regulations that had to do with the order in which the messages were sent, he let me try my hand at sending.

One night when we were off Cape Hatteras and a furious gale was blowing Harry got suddenly sick and as this is the worst part of the whole trip the Captain was in a quandary about his wireless messages. Harry told him that I could work the instruments and to put me in his place. The Captain seemed doubtful at first because of my age, but there was nothing else he could do.

Naturally I made a few mistakes but at that I was pretty successful and I had the distinction, so the Captain told my father, of being the youngest operator on board ship on record.

Well, the gist of it all was that when I graduated from High School in the spring and wanted a job as an operator I made application to the United Wireless Company, which at that time controlled about all the coastwise steamers, and, armed with a letter of recommendation from Captain Harding of the Almirante, I got it on the good ship Carlos Madino.

The year I was the operator on this ship I visited many Central American ports. I became more and more imbued with the desire to see farther around the corners of the great round world and I think I can safely say I have done so in a fairly creditable manner.

CHAPTER III—WHEN THE ANDALUSIAN WENT DOWN

As I have said, I was in the coastwise trade for nearly a year, and could savvy anything in English or Spanish, Morse or Continental, that the old-time operators were able to send. I had sent and received messages of every description and for every conceivable purpose.

Why, once a brother operator and I married a maid who was on board my ship to a man somewhere in Panama by wireless. Of course there was a minister at each end to help the ceremony along but it was we operators who really did it with our wireless sets.

Another time while we were running through a storm it was my pleasant duty to flash the tidings ashore that a stork had overtaken us and added two more to our passenger list, both consigned, to use a maritime term, to the same family.

The most exciting time I had while I was on the Carlos Madino was when we were taking a cargo of munitions to the Nicaraguan government and which we had orders to land at “Alvarada,” the headquarters of the Army.

When we were within a day’s run of that port I heard the call CM CM CM which was our ship. I sent my O. K., and then got a message for the Captain which told him to land the cargo at “Grayville” as the insurgents were watching “Alvarada.” It was signed Strada, Minister of War, Nicaragua.

I took this important message to the Captain myself and we were soon headed for “Grayville.” Several other messages passed between the Captain and the Minister of War and it struck me that the signals were the strongest I had ever received for the distance covered; in fact they were strong enough for a 5 kilowatt transmitter instead of a 2 kilowatt transmitter which I knew was installed at the station at “Alvarada.”

My first thought was that I had struck some highly sensitive spot on my crystal and I tested it out only to find that wherever I put the wire point on it the signals came in just as clear and loud. I wondered. While I am not the seventh son of a son-of-a-gun nor do I claim any supernatural powers I got the hunch that down here in tropic waters where insurrections are the rule and not the exception all was not as it should be.

I told the Captain about it and while he didn’t take much stock in the idea he had a search made of the ship. One of the room stewards reported that he had found an electric cord with a plug end hanging from a lamp socket in room 138. It might have been for an electric iron, for a hot-water heater or any one of a dozen other electric appliances, he said, but it looked suspicious.

A more thorough search of room 138, in which the Captain and I took part, revealed a heavy suit case under the bunk, which had a place to plug in the cord, another for the receivers, and a key—at least this was my theory. A strict watch was kept on the stateroom and I went back and sent GA, which was the call for “Alvarada” every few minutes.

In the course of fifteen minutes or so I got the OK of the operator at GA. The steward who had entered the stateroom adjoining the one occupied by the suspect heard the faintest sounds of sparks coming from it. After this report I made a careful examination of my aerial and found that the leading-in wire from it which connected with my aerial switch had been cut while the end of the wire from my instruments had been connected to a wire so small it could scarcely be seen and this wire led to stateroom 138.

After connecting my instruments to the aerial again I immediately got in touch with the station at “Alvarada” and learned that no orders had been given by the Minister of War to change our port of destination. The Captain had the protesting passenger put in irons to be turned over to the government officials of Nicaragua and thus it was that another small insurrection was knocked in the head.

I had filed an application with the Marconi Company of America for a job on one of their transatlantic ships; it was in for nearly three months and I had long since concluded that it and I were pigeonholed. My great ambition now was to get a berth on one of the big ships that crossed the pond. Various operators had told me that it was useless to try to get in with the Marconi Company because the latter employed only operators who received their training in the Marconi wireless schools abroad.

Be that as it may on one of my return trips my father handed me a note from the Chief Engineer of the Marconi Company to see him. I did so and the result of that interview gave me the post of Chief Wireless officer of the s. s. Andalusian, one of the largest ships of the Blue Star Line.

Her route was between New York and Liverpool. Built by Harlan and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland, she was launched in 1901 and fitted for the transatlantic service in 1902. She was over 600 feet long, her breadth was nearly 70 feet and her depth was 40 feet. Talk about a ship, boy, the Andalusian was as far ahead of the Carlos Madino as that ship was ahead of a lifeboat.

The aerial of the Andalusian was formed of two wires 375 feet long and suspended between her top-gallant masts 200 feet above the sea and were held apart by two 8-foot spreaders. She was one of the first ships to be fitted with wireless and her wireless room was a specially built room on the port side of the forward saloon deck.

Although the apparatus was of the old Marconi type, having been installed when the ship was built, we could send from 300 to 400 miles with it and receive four times that distance. The transmitter was formed of two 10 inch induction coils the primaries of which were connected in series and the secondaries in parallel so that while the length of the spark was still 10 inches it was twice as fat and hence proportionately more powerful.

There was a jigger, as Marconi called his tuning coil, and a battery of 18 Leyden jars made up the condenser for tuning the sending circuits. It was also fitted with a new kind of a key invented by Sammis who was at that time the chief engineer of the Marconi Company of America.

He called it a changeover switch but it was really a key and an aerial switch combined. In order to connect the receiver with the aerial all you had to do was to turn the key, which was on a pivot, to the right. When the key was turned it also cut off the current from the transmitter by breaking the sliding contact between them.

To throw on the transmitter and cut off the receiver you simply turned the key back to its normal position and this made the connection between the aerial and tuning coil and at the same time it closed the circuit connecting the source of current with the induction coils.

The up-to-date feature of this set was the storage battery which provided an auxiliary source of current so that in the event of the ship becoming disabled and water flooding the engine room, which would put the dynamo out of commission, the storage battery in the operating room could be thrown in and C Q D could be sent out as long as the wireless room remained above water. This was a mighty good piece of hindsight, for ships that might otherwise have been saved by wireless had gone down at sea with passengers, crew and cargo simply because the dynamos were drowned out.

The receiver was different from the one I used on the Carlos Madino for instead of a crystal detector we had a magnetic detector which Marconi had recently invented. While the magnetic detector was not nearly as sensitive as a crystal detector when you found a sensitive spot on the latter, still there were no adjustments to be constantly made as with the former.

Now I’ve told you something about the ship and her wireless equipment and right here I want to introduce Algernon Percy Jeems, Second Wireless Officer of the Andalusian and my assistant. Perce, as I called him, looked his name and lived up to it. He was as thoroughbred a gentleman as ever worked a key.

He wasn’t very big in body—only 5 foot 4—and he was of very frail build but he proved to be a giant when it came to sheer bravery and as for meeting death when duty called he was absolutely unafraid. In fact when he saw the grim old reaper bearing down on him he went out of his way to grasp him by the hand and said: “When I get through with this message I’ll be ready to go with you.” And he did!

Before I tell you what happened to the Andalusian and of the heroic nerve of Jeems, I want you to know what C Q D means and how it came to be used as a distress signal. It was not until Jack Binns, who stuck to his key for 52 hours on the ill-fated Republic and by so doing saved the lives of 1600 passengers and crew on board that C Q D came to be known the world over as a distress signal.

In the Continental code, which is used all over Europe by the wire telegraph lines, C Q means that every operator on the line shall give attention to the message which is to follow. It was natural then that when wireless apparatus began to be installed on ships that the Continental code should be the one used. C Q was the call signal employed to mean that every operator was to give attention to the message to follow, just as in the wire systems, or as it is said on shipboard to stand by.

Then the Marconi Company added the letter D which means danger, hence C Q D means stand by danger and when this signal is received by an operator at sea, no matter how important the message that he is sending or receiving may be, he drops it at once and answers the C Q D signal to find out what the trouble is.

Now to go on with the story: We sailed from Liverpool about noon on the 15th of March for New York with a full passenger list and a valuable cargo. The first couple of days out the weather was fairly decent but as usual at this time of the year we ran into a real winter gale. We were struck time and again by mountainous seas. One gigantic wave that broke over her bow tore away a part of the bridge, others poured through ventilators and nearly every time she was hit more damage was done. To make matters worse the high winds drove us out of our course.

Although a sharp watch was kept it was so dark at night the lookout couldn’t see his hand an arm’s length before his eyes though he might have been able to see a ship’s lights ahead had one been bearing down on us. As the Captain had been on the bridge continuously for three days and nights I felt it was my duty as the first wireless officer to stick to my key, and though it was Perce’s watch I told him to turn in.

About midnight I heard the hull scrape against something that sounded as though she’d struck bottom when crossing a bar, or perhaps it was an iceberg. She keeled over until I thought she was a goner but straining and giving in every part of her superstructure she gradually rolled back and righted herself again.

The saloon and second cabin passengers came tumbling out of their rooms in nighties and pajamas but what they lacked in clothes they made up in life preservers. Wherever you find danger there you will find among the panic-stricken a few cool, calm and collected men and women and sure enough two or three men and as many women appeared a few minutes later fully dressed and ready for anything that might happen. The officers assured all hands that nothing had or could happen and nearly all of them returned to their rooms.

The third class passengers were locked in the steerage and here pandemonium reigned. They pounded on the hatchways and demanded that they be allowed to go on deck; they were scared stiff. Like the other and more fortunate passengers they were soon quieted by cool headed stewards and returned to their miserable quarters in the fo’cas’le.

Within the next couple of hours one of the assistant engineers discovered that the seams of the hull had parted aft and the water was pouring into her hold. The Captain ordered all the bulkhead doors closed, to keep the water out of the other compartments, and her great pumps going, but once started the mighty pressure of the inrushing water ripped her seams farther along and broadened the gap. Knowing she could not stay afloat for any great length of time the Captain ordered me to send out the call for help and to be quick about it.

I got busy with the key sending out C Q D C Q D C Q D listening inbetween the calls as I never listened before to get an O K to my signals. It seemed as if all the operators were either asleep, dead or on the other side of the Equator, but after an eternity of time—which probably amounted to as much as five minutes by the clock—I caught the signal O K and then, “what’s up, old man.”

It was the s. s. Arapahoe that had answered and I was nearly frantic with joy for I felt that all of the responsibility for saving those 1200 souls on board rested entirely on me. I sent back the name of our ship, told him we were fast sinking, gave our latitude and longitude so that the Arapahoe would know where to find us if by good fortune we were still afloat when she reached us and, I added “for God’s sake put on all speed.”

In the meantime all the passengers had been notified, told to dress and to put on their life preservers while the sailors had been ordered to man the life-boats. When the passengers came on deck the situation was calmly explained to them together with the hopeful information that three steamers were bound for us as fast as steam could carry them for I had got the O K from two others—the Morocco and the Carlisle.

There was, on the whole, very little excitement now among the saloon and second-class passengers, and, curiously enough, I observed that those who had been seasick nigh unto death seemed to forget their ailment in the face of danger and had their sea-legs on well enough to look after their own safety. It proves, I think, that seasickness is largely a matter of an exaggerated imagination plus a lack of will power.

Before the hatches were opened to let the steerage passengers out of their hole and on to the lower deck the Captain and one of his officers took their places on the main deck forward where they could watch every move the poor frightened mob made. They came helter-skelter up the hatchways falling all over themselves and everybody else, but when they saw the Captain and the officer towering above them each with a brace of horse-pistols leveled at them like young cannon they eased off a bit their desire to be saved at the expense of others and the stewards had no further trouble with them.

Just then Perce got awake and hearing the gruff orders of the officers, the throbbing of the big pumps and the loud and excited talk of the passengers, he wanted to know the cause of it.

“The ship is sinking! so get up right away,” I exclaimed as evenly as my voice would let me and working the key for dear life.

“Oh, she is, is she,” he yawned as if it was an every-day occurrence. There was no excitability in Perce’s makeup.

Well, sir, we kept her afloat until daylight when the Captain ordered every one to the life-boats, women and children first.

Perce and I stuck to our instruments, keeping the ether busy and every now and then sending out cheery bulletins to the passengers, the gist of them all being that help was almost at hand.

I could feel the ship begin to settle and the life-boats loaded to the gunwales with their cargo of human freight, were quickly lowered into the running sea. It required great seamanship to do this and even then one or two of them were capsized.

The Captain suddenly appeared before our window.

“Boys, you have done your duty. Now save yourselves,” and with that he was gone.

I could feel her nose pointing up in the air and I knew she was going down stern-end on. It was only a question of minutes.

“Go on, Perce. I’ll stick here.”

“Go on yourself,” he replied; “if any one stays I will.”

I don’t know exactly what happened but something flying through the air must have hit me, for the next thing I knew I had struck the icy water and had gone down several fathoms. The sudden ducking revived me and when I came up I swam for an overcrowded life-boat. The bos’n pulled me in and a woman’s voice whispered, “Thank God, he’s saved!”

There on the edge of the horizon I could see the dim outline of a ship with a great black stream of smoke in her wake and I knew her for the Arapahoe at last.

“Where’s the little operator?” a man asked me.

The bos’n pointed to the fast sinking ship, the bow end only of which was out of the water, and said, “There he is, sir!”

And as we looked we saw big brave Captain Stacey and little heroic Perce with their right hands clasped and with the Captain’s left hand on Perce’s shoulder, just as two old friends might greet each other on Broadway or the Strand, who had not met for a long time.

An instant later the great ship sank from sight leaving a momentary whirlpool, due to the suction of it, in the water.

The Arapahoe reached us an hour later and stood by and considering the heavy seaway and the wind, which though it had somewhat abated was still blowing half a gale, picked up the survivors and then proceeded on her way.

The passengers made a good deal over me and, since I am only human, I should have enjoyed their worship immensely, but while I had done my duty I knew it was Perce who was the real hero and I told them so.

CHAPTER IV—CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS

What did I do when I got back, did you say? Well, after the sinking of the Andalusian my folks thought I ought to be willing to give up the sea and confine my adventures to Montclair, the Lackawanna Railroad and New York, and they urged me to settle down and sell engines, or get into some other kind of business in the big town and commute like the rest of the suburbanites.

I tried it for a few months but the air is dead on land and it stifles me like poison-gas when I breathe it, and besides, I kept hearing the call of the sea oftener and oftener and louder and louder just as though a spook mermaid were holding a conch shell to my ear.

Well, sir, there were just no two ways about it. I was not cut out for a salesman but I could handle a key with the best of them. So one bright day—it was the first of March—when dad told me to go out and see a prospect who wanted a 40 horsepower crude oil engine, I made one stone kill two sparrows and after fencing with the would-be buyer for half an hour I slipped over to the Lord’s Court Building where the Marconi Company had their offices and talked with my friend Sammis, the Chief Engineer.

“No, there isn’t anything you’d want just now,” he reflected. “There’s a couple of new ships building in Belfast for the Cunard Line and one of them will be launched in a couple of months. I might be able to get a berth for you on her.”

“I want to go right now if I go at all,” I told him, for the land ached in my bones like the old Harry and I knew the only way I could get relief was to go to sea.

“How would you like to go on a seal catching expedition to the Arctic? It ought to be a pretty good health trip for an overworked salesman. The Polar Bear and Midnight Sun sail in a couple of weeks from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to be gone for a month or so and the pay is double that of any operator in the transatlantic service. I have just shipped an operator named Mackey up there and gave him the post on the Midnight Sun so you’ll have company, for they will sail together. If you’ll take it I’ll try to get you a good berth in the meantime.”

“To the Arctic,” I ejaculated. “Well, Sammis, this is a voyage I’ll have to sleep over, but it sounds good to me. I’ll let you know in the morning.”

There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind but that I’d take it but I didn’t know exactly what my folks would say about it, for their idea was that they had had enough of my going to sea and they further thought that I ought now to be perfectly satisfied to stay on land for the rest of my natural life.

Do you know that when I stepped out of the Lord’s Court Building after having signed up the next day I could feel the stone sidewalk rolling under me like the deck of a ship and that the putrid air of Wall Street smelled as if it had a dash of sea salt in it. That’s how great I felt. Dad would have to get some one else to sell his engines—it was the Arctic for me!

WE WERE CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS!

On arriving at St. Johns I at once hunted up Captain James of the Polar Bear and handed him my commission. And such a captain he was! He looked a different race of seafaring men from the captains I had seen in the regular Atlantic service.

His grizzled hair and beard and clear, keen eyes were gray; that part of his face which showed was about two shades lighter than the color of dried walrus meat and with his silence—except when any of the crew failed in his duties—you would have known, even if you’d met him on Broadway, that his home was somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. He turned me over to his first mate who also looked as if he had a heart of oak and would be equal to any duty he might be called on to perform if it was north of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude at St. Johns.

And, oh, the crew! They were cutters of the old school, every one of them. I had no idea that sailors of their kind were to be found anywhere at this time here on earth except in song and story, but there they actually were all about me in the living flesh. There was an air about them that told as plainly as spoken words they had weathered many a polar storm and that now, even at St. Johns, they were way too far south of the bleak, frozen regions to be in their element.

And say, the ship! She was a beaut of the old wooden kind, not a whole lot to look at, but built to stand the strains of furious gales as well as the tremendous pressures of the ice packs. Indeed, she had been one of Commander Peary’s ships which had been farthest north when that explorer sought to find the North Pole some years before.

The wireless apparatus and I were the only objects on the ship that seemed not to belong to her, but when we reached the sealing grounds we found ourselves and helped in the catch, thereby making friends with the Captain and his crew.

The transmitter was formed of a single ten inch induction coil which was energized by a current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver was of the regular Marconi type with a magnetic detector. The masts of the Polar Bear were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made up of half-a-dozen wires swung between them.

Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there was no ground. It was no small job to get a decent ground for the ship, as I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull. Now where a ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a ground is to simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any other metal part of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the water the very best kind of a ground is had without any trouble to get it. But what’s to be done when there’s nothing but an old-fashioned wooden hull between your instruments and the water? The way I did it was to run a wire from the instruments down to the engine room; then the assistant engineer fixed a 6 x 6 x 24 inch block of wood parallel with and close to the propeller shaft; this done we screwed a copper brush, that is a strip of stiff sheet copper, to the block so that it pressed flat on and hard against the shaft.

Under the head of one of the screws I looped the free end of my ground wire and screwed it down tight. This made a good enough ground connection through the shaft and the propeller keyed to it which was submerged in the water. With this transmitter, aerial and ground, I could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions were favorable.

Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for at that time of the year—it was nearing the middle of March—a score or more of ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador Coast to the frozen north where the young harp seals are found by the thousands on the ice floes off the coast.

Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted with an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way over to her to see Mackey, her operator.

In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as these gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted by ships with steel hulls, and the Midnight Sun was the first of these fine new steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the Polar Bear, but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I liked my ship the best.

I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we straightway became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who owned the Polar Bear also owned the Midnight Sun and that the Captains of them were to work together. A new experiment was to be tried, he said, and that was to catch seals by wireless, but what the modus operandi of the scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. I remember when I was a little boy that folks talked about running street cars by electricity and I wondered how it could be done. I had a kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and carries her for’ard.

In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it energized and finally back to the power house through the rails; further that it was the power of the motor thus developed which drove the wheels of the car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be altogether too round-about a way—too far-fetched—to justify the statement that the “car runs by electricity.”

The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “hats cleaned by electricity,” “eggs hatched by electricity,” and “diamonds made by electricity,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric motor, the eggs are hatched in an incubator which is heated by a current flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an electric furnace.

Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague, mysterious and altogether a difficult proposition to see into—even as running a car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are wonderful creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing act in a show, and I have heard that they have a great liking for music. A seal hunter can take a phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up where there is a patch of seals and start it going. The seals will come out of the water to listen to the sweet strains and every time one puts its nose above the surface the hunter, who is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his rifle. This then is what you might call hunting seals with music.

It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and pull them aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in quite so direct a fashion, as you will presently see.

We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.

Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic Circle.

The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in between are trappers, fishermen and live yeres. The trappers push into the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the cod-fish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will say that he lives yere, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the population. The condition of all these poor, simple folk has been much improved by wireless.

For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made calls at all the ports along the coast and she did this about every six months. If any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had to know it a long way ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful enough to order it the chances are that by the time it reached him he had forgotten he had ordered it or had gotten over wanting it.

On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to wait to get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case a little more accurately to say that however ill they might be they had to wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything might and often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this has been changed by wireless which now links up the towns along the coast with Battle Harbor where the Royal Deep Sea Mission has its hospital for fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far greater importance, the sick may have their diseases diagnosed and medicine prescribed though they are as far away as Maine, by the doctor in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric wave.

As we steamed up the coast the ice fields began to loom up and as far as the eye could reach they glittered and sparkled like gigantic jewels under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night came on and the stars came out they shone a hundred fold brighter than in the temperate zone and the pale blue moon illuminated the scene with a kind of a supernatural light that seemed not to belong to earth.

But all the days and nights were by no means fine ones, for howling gales and fierce snow storms continually sprang up and I often wondered how a ship built and sailed by the hands of men, could weather them out. It was a man’s work! On such occasions I stuck to my wireless room which I found mighty comfortable and trusted to the Captain and his mates to see the ship safely through.

As we got farther and farther north the Aurora borealis, or northern lights as it is called, grew brighter and brighter every night until the whole heavens in the region of the North Pole were scintillating with streamers that spread out like a great fan, reaching over our heads and far to the south. The first mate said that it was as brilliant an aurora as he had ever seen and his explanation of it was that the spots on the sun had been unusually large and numerous.

Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in the aurora, but it set up a violent magnetic storm on earth and this made the compass needles oscillate to and fro as much as 1½ degrees on each side of their normal positions. Now magnetic storms always interfere very seriously with the operation of both overland telegraph lines and cable systems where the circuit is completed through the earth.

I had heard some one say, or had read somewhere, that a magnetic storm would interfere in the same way with wireless messages and I was fearful for some time that it would put our signals out of commission. But all through the magnetic storm Mackey and I sent our messages without the slightest trouble—indeed if we had not been told that a magnetic storm was on we should never have guessed it. Evidently wireless had scored another point over the wire systems and another pet theory was put on the ice to cool.

We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close to it while the Midnight Sun steamed up and out from it until we were fifty or more miles apart. Now here is where wireless came in, in catching seals. Over the constantly broadening gap between our ships Mackey and I kept their Captains right in touch with each other.

The Captain of his ship wirelessed that there were any number of old seals about him and this showed, the first mate told me, that there were patches of white coats, as the young harp-seals are called, somewhere in the neighborhood.

Our ship immediately headed in his direction and a night’s steaming brought us within a few miles of the Midnight Sun, but we did not see any white coats either. But after we scouted around for five or six hours we sighted a patch of hundreds upon hundreds of little seal babies basking on the ice floes in the sun. My Captain ordered me to signal the good news of our find to the Captain of the Midnight Sun; he in turn steamed at once for our ship and when she came up the killing began.

These seals are called harp-seals because they have brownish yellow bodies and on the back of each one is a big black mark like a harp. The old harp-seals start from way up north of Melville Sound in the early part of the winter and by March they are off the Labrador coast. There tens of thousands of them herd together on the drifting ice when the little white-coats, as the baby seals are called because their fur is so white, are born and, curiously enough, nearly all of them are born on the same day.

It was a great sight to see these fat roly-poly baby seals lying on their backs on the drifting ice and using their flippers to fan themselves with to keep cool.

A few days later the ships were so close to each other that Mackey and I visited back and forth across the ice while the crews were busy taking the seals. When we headed for St. Johns we had on board our ship more than twenty-five thousand sealskins, which was as big a load as we could carry, while the Midnight Sun had nearly fifty thousand and together we broke all previous records.

This being the case these hardened Arctic Captains were as tickled as a couple of sea-urchins and both agreed that wireless was the greatest sealing scheme introduced since steamers took the place of schooners.

Before we bore up for St. Johns there were great doings on board both ships. Rockets were fired in lieu of regular fireworks and Mackey, having the most powerful set, sent a message to old Boreas and old Arcticus who are pioneers in the refrigerating business, and if the North Pole has an aerial suspended from it and the latter has a receiver attached to it, I doubt not but that they listened-in to the first wireless signals ever sent within the polar circle; if so, they heard some mighty fine things said about themselves and the glorious, though, withal frigid, country they rule over.

I wouldn’t have missed that experience for a million dollars—what’s that?—well, not for a hundred dollars in real money anyway.

CHAPTER V—MY ADVENTURES IN THE TROPICS

When Bert Mackey and I got back to New York we were both in the same boat—to wit, we were without jobs. On the way down, though, Bert unfolded a very alluring scheme by which we could, he allowed, make oodles of money and at the same time stand a chance of meeting with something that looked like real adventure.

“Do you know, Jack,” Bert said confidentially, “that I went into the wireless game simply because it appeared to me to offer the best chance of meeting Miss Adventure. I’ve been at it for five years now and I’ve never even had the pleasure of getting a look at her face.

“Wherever I go she is always on the other side of the street and although I tip my hat to her she never looks up, much less gives me a tumble. I took that sealing job because I certainly thought I’d meet Miss Adventure somewhere among the ice floes and blizzards of the Arctic North. But no! all I did was to sit in my cabin and send what my Captain wanted to tell your Captain and receive what your Captain had to say to my Captain. And to what purpose? So that a few rich men could get richer by enabling vain women to run around the streets of New York and a few other big burgs bedecked out in the skins of baby seals that had been clubbed to death. Now that’s big business for men and women to be in, isn’t it?

“I wish I could get a job on a pirate ship or start a revolution in some punk Central American country. And it’s funny,” he went on complainingly, “how a fellow like you, who has only been in the service a couple of years, could meet with a big adventure like the sinking of the Andalusian, I’d have given a year of my life to have been in your place.

“Now down along the Amazon River there are great rubber plantations, savage tribes of Indians, tigers, monkeys, boa-constrictors and all the garnishings that go to make up a first class tropical jungle. I know a man in New York that does business with a rubber concern in Para, Brazil and he told me, just before we sailed north, that the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil had a contract to put up half a dozen wireless stations along the river.

“It strikes me, Jack, that it would be a good scheme if you and I took a trip down there and looked over the ground. What do you say?”

Having a few dollars in my pocket and nothing else to do at that particular moment I said O K and agreed to join him provided we could get free transportation on some liner going down there. Bert assured me that he could fix it and he was as good as his word.

So it was we sailed in due time on the Ceara of the Holliday Line. It was an old tub that stood every chance of having on board Miss Adventure and I didn’t doubt in the least but that Bert would have ample opportunity to strike up an acquaintance with her and to swim back, if he got back at all, for the Ceara had no wireless equipment—such was her regard for the laws of the U.S.

As luck would have it we had fine weather and she beat her way down just as she had for the last quarter of a century if she was as old as she looked. We enjoyed the trip, at that, for there were not many passengers aboard and all of them, especially the South Americans, were very pleasant people. Having learned that we had never been in South America we were told that it was a great country full of possibilities for young men with some capital but that if we were unacquainted there it would be better for us to about face at Para and go home.

Bert and I had other thoughts on the subject but as we were nearing the Equator I kind of wondered why I had not stayed at home selling crude-oil engines or taking the post on the new Cunarder that Sammis said he’d get for me, or doing something else that was nice and cool.

In a little less than a month’s time we landed at Para, as it is popularly called, or Belem, as it is more properly called, or to give it its full name Santa Maria de Del Belem do Para. Just as New Orleans is built back from the Gulf of Mexico, on the Mississippi River so Para is situated a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic on the Amazon River. So this is Para from which Para rubber comes, thought I as I looked about, and indeed I should have known it had I sailed into port with my eyes shut for the smell of rubber everywhere permeated the air.

But don’t think for a moment that it is made up of a lot of adobe houses as so many Mexican towns are. Far from it, for in architecture it is a miniature reproduction of Rio de Janeiro, which city in turn looks more like Paris than any other in either North or South America. Nor is Para a small burg, for it has a population of a hundred thousand now and some day, if the Amazon valley is ever developed, it may be larger than Rio de Janeiro, aye, even than New York itself.

Different from the equatorial city I expected to find, where every one had nothing to do but to lie under a palm tree, look at the blue sky, smoke cigarettes and agitate the air with a fan, there was much to do, for there rubber is King, and the white, yellow and black folks were doing it with a good deal of vim too. The demand for rubber, we learned, was greater than it had ever been before and consequently the people were prosperous and happy.

After a deal of searching we located the offices of the Compagnie Francaise de Telegraphie sans Fil and Bert explained to Señor Benoit, the manager, that we were a couple of wireless operators from the United States. The manager acted as though he was dazed and Bert handed him our credentials to set him right.

In a moment, though, he recovered and I wish you could have seen the way he greeted us! You’d have thought he’d found two long lost brothers for he hugged us in turn and almost wept on our necks. I thought the heat and the smell of the rubber had made him nutty where as it was only his great good luck. Believe me, he knew exactly what it was all about.

He had come on from France six months before to put up a chain of wireless stations beginning at Para and on up the river for 2500 miles to Equitos, at intervals of about 500 miles. Before the wireless men got to Jurutty they had been taken down with the fever and were even then on their way to Para, and so the job was open and ready for us to tackle. He agreed to pay us a million reis, including all our expenses and a million reis for every month we remained as operators in his company’s service. It didn’t take half-an-eye to see that if we could stick it out for a few months we’d be regular millionaires.

“I want to make our wireless system a success to show the Brazilian capitalists its superiority over the wire system. They have an overhead line stretched along the banks of the river but it gives very poor service for any one of a number of reasons, chief among them being that it is hard to keep iron wires from rusting away owing to the great amount of rain, and when copper wire is used the Indians have a great liking for it and cut out a length here and there whenever they want it.

“With wireless it is different and if I can only get the stations set up and working I will show the advantages of it over the wire system very quickly. Wireless will be safer and surer for the rains can’t affect it and I am quite sure the Indians will not steal the ether.”

We took passage on the Asuncion, one of the Amazon Steamship Company’s fleet of small steamers and sailed up the Rio Amazonia, or as we call it the Amazon River, the mightiest of all flowing waters. On either side of it for hundreds of miles lay a tangled mass of tropical vegetation—the jungle in very truth. The villages were far between but occasionally we saw the rude huts of a few settlers who had come forth from the civilized quarters of the world to sap out their energies and make their fortunes in rubber.

We were told that a mighty small area of the jungle had been explored though a few expeditions had made their devious ways through some parts of it either for scientific purposes, such as studying the vegetation and living things, or for commercial reasons as getting plants for medicines and more frequently rubber.

And rain! I can’t remember a day down there when it didn’t rain. The reason it rains so much is this: the warm winds that blow up the river from the Atlantic carry a lot of moisture with them and the winds that blow down the river from the Andes are cold and when they come together, the moisture condenses and it rains.

The scenery looked about the same all the way along—just one mass of tropical trees of all kinds for the warp and these were woven together with vines of every description for the woof. I could see our finish before we started in to “look over the ground” as Bert had suggested when we were in dear old New York. Yes, dear little old New York—how I wished I were back there again.

As for rubber plantations they were there, the savage tribes of Indians were there too—I didn’t see them on the trip up stream but they were there all right just as Bert had said. There were no tigers as Bert guessed but we saw the onca, or jaguar (pronounced ja-gwar), a buff feline beast covered with black spots that is a second cousin to the tiger in both size and ferociousness.

The whole blooming tribe of monkeys with faces on them that ought to make a fellow ashamed to look at himself in a glass, and make you know that Darwin was right; boa-constrictors and seven million, more or less of other kinds of snakes were there—in fact equatorial America was all that Bert, or I, or any one else, ever dreamed it was and then multiply it by about a hundred and you will get a faint impression of it. Yes, beasts, birds, fishes, snakes and insects end without number, and each a marvel of its kind, were there and so was the Indian princess.

There was the tapir, a sort of a cross between a horse and a rhinocerous having a short proboscis as though its snout was made of rubber and some one had stretched it for him; it is a shy and harmless beastie that moves about chiefly at night. The sloth, a greenish-brown animal whose chief business it is to hang back downward from the branch of a tree and to sleep away its life.

The ant-eater who picks up a living by eating ants and other insects. All hail to the ant-eater! I’ve seen a dozen other animals down there that have no business outside of a jungle, or a zoo or a menagerie. Lizards are there in great variety from those that change their colors while you wait to those the natives serve up for you to eat.

And talking about colors, no coal tar dye was ever discovered that could begin to equal the plumage of the birds down there. Large parrots called macaws, parakeets, which are little parrots with long tails, cockatoos and love birds, which belong to the parrot family, and others on down to humming birds that are scarcely larger than wasps, are as thick as microbes in sour milk.

But the jungle is the paradise of the insects; there is every conceivable kind and then as many more that are beyond human belief: gigantic, gorgeous butterflies, beetles that looked as if they had been stencilled with the rainbow colors of the sun, and flies as numerous per square unit of space as grains of powder in the charge of an 8 gauge shell.

The ants, though, have all the other insects faded and everything else in the jungle that lives on the ground. Next to William Hohenzollern’s armies that devastated Belgium and Flanders rank the Amazon armies of ants that march out to seek what and whom they can devour. Everything from a jaguar on down that gets in their way becomes meat and drink for them.

You have, of course, often watched our little fireflies and wondered what kind of an apparatus was installed in their anatomy which produces the intermittent, phosphorescent light as they flit around. Well, down in Brazil there are fireflies that look like electric lights. They measure nearly 4 inches long, and 1¼ inches wide and carry three light reservoirs—two in the thorax and one in the abdomen—and these give off a bright greenish light.

When the natives want a light they simply catch a few fireflies, put them in a bottle and cork it up. They could read by this light if they could read but they can’t so the chief use to which they put the fire-fly lights is to hunt around in their beds to see what has crawled in with them. This, then, is the cheapest form of light and, according to Sir Oliver Lodge, if man could produce an electric light with as little expenditure of power as the fire-fly then a boy turning the handle of an electric machine could light up a good sized factory.

The things that live in the Amazon River are just as plentiful as those that inhabit the jungle. The manatee, or sea-cow as it is called, is the largest having a length of something like 10 feet. If you were far enough away from it you might mistake it for a seal for it has the same general outline. Turtles grow to be 3 feet long, and oddsfish, there’s enough different kinds to stock the seven seas and then have some left over for the boarding houses.

I could talk to you for a week about the strange living creatures I saw in and along the banks of the Amazon and in the jungle, but the trees and plants are just as wonderful. For instance, there are palms out of which palm-leaf fans are made and palm trees that grow up as high as wireless masts and on their main trucks and pennants are cocoanuts. Trees that when you tap ’em rubber, milk or cold water comes forth depending on the kind of a tree it happens to be. Also a large number of most uncommon fruits are there in great abundance.

At last we arrived at our destination, Jurutty, a village about 500 miles east of Manaos. When we landed my first and only thought was of home and mother. My trip to the Arctic was a delightful little pleasure jaunt as against this one up the Amazon River! Had I been castaway on the moon, aye, even on Mars, I couldn’t have felt more remote from my native land than when I stepped ashore at Jurutty. And yet, would you believe it, now that it is in the past tense I would like to go there once again.

We were met at the dock by Señor Castro, the fezendero, that is the owner of the fezenda, which means the plantation. He was a mixture of Portuguese and Indian but none the less a gentleman for that. A motley crew of negroes, men, women and children with very little clothing on and Indians who hadn’t the remotest idea why any one should wear clothes at all, and mixtures of these races, were also at hand to see the newcomers.

Señor Castro was right glad to see us and after shaking hands with us half-a-dozen times he led the way back through a path in the jungle to his fezenda. We dined in his home as I had never dined before nor have since, drank coffee that threw the surpassing beverage of the same name which is brewed in Child’s and the Waldorf-Astoria in the shade and smoked his long tobacco wrapped cigarettes.

Then we talked wireless. The apparatus, as Señor Benoit had said, was there and Señor Castro assured us that we should have all the help we needed to set it up. He told us that there was an electric generator and a crude-oil engine to furnish the power to run it with—and yet there were hundreds of thousands of horse power to be had from the Amazon—but which had never been tapped. Fortunately I happened to know all about the history, theory and practise of oil engines and how to sell them if the alleged prospects had the slightest idea of buying such power units.

Señor Castro also had a billiard table, a phonograph and other civilized inventions to while away life as pleasantly as possible in the jungle, and taking it all in all Bert and I considered that things were not altogether against us.

After we turned in our bobbinet curtained beds that night all went well until we were awakened in the small hours by the sound of a woman’s voice outside. Thinking it was some female in distress Bert awakened the fezendero only to be told with great courtesy that it was not a woman but an organ bird. Bert returned saying something about forming a Society for the Prevention of Jungle Noises at Night, and we slept again.

In the morning Señor Castro took us out to show us his fezenda. Three small horses were saddled ready for us to ride—though I can ride a wave at sea much better than I can ride a quadruped on land. We rode around his rubber plantation and Señor Castro showed us how the rubber trees are tapped, explained that the fluid which comes from the trees is not the sap of the wood but of the bark and we saw how the natives stick little tin-cups to the trees with bits of clay to catch the fluid.

On returning we rode along the edge of the jungle and Señor Castro cautioned us “never to go into the jungle for you will either get lost, be killed by jaguars, bitten by snakes, or by fever laden insects which are just as bad.”

“To the south of us,” he went on calmly, “are the Caripunas—aboriginal Indians that kill and eat people if they get a chance.”