A. Frederick Collins

“ Marconi tackled it all the instruments that were needed for telegraphing without wires were at hand but no one had quite caught on how to use them.
Nearly every one thinks, too, that it is far more wonderful to send wireless messages than it is to send messages over a wire; but this is not the case at all, though both, I trow, are wonderful enough. When we say a message is sent by wireless we do not mean, by a long shot, that it goes from the place where it is sent to the place where it is received without anything between them to carry it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have a very hazy idea of what the Monroe Doctrine means but I’ve had occasion to observe that whenever a country can’t govern itself or the ruler of some country wants to govern the whole world Uncle Sam just naturally drives a gun carriage through the Monroe Doctrine and settles the affair to everybody’s satisfaction once and for all. He is very like a school teacher who is so much annoyed by a couple of his pupils that are constantly arguing and fighting he finally gets mad himself and licks both of them and then things quiet down and become decent like. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In that year Heinrich Hertz, a young German college professor, discovered that when an electric spark was made by any kind of an apparatus the positive and negative electric charges in uniting together would not only break down the air to make the spark, but would form an oscillating current, that is, a current which surges to and fro hundreds of thousands of times a second, and that this high frequency current, as it is called, sets up waves in the ether just as the vibrations of a bell set up waves in the air. ”

“ Marconi is here for is not particularly to get signals from passing ships far out at sea, but to try and get Poldhu! It made my hair stand on end at the thought of such wonders. And if he gets it he will have spanned the Atlantic—over 2,000 miles—with his wireless waves. He will have done the biggest scientific thing since Cyrus Field joined the old and the new worlds with his cable! Whoopee! Yow! Yow!
From that moment on I was walking on air. The inventor, whatever he may have felt, was calm, cool and collected, dignified at all times but always in a good humor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we got into the war it was clear that we had a war-zone right here at home and one that was not to be sneezed at, for, since a submarine could be built large enough to travel the whole distance from Europe to America without having to be convoyed by a base, or mother-ship as she is called, Germany could as easily send over to our shores one or a dozen submarines as large as the Deutschland, fitted out with rapid-fire guns and torpedoes and do a lot of damage to our shipping and even to our cities. ”

“ But this chaser of ours draws only 4 feet of water and so a torpedo, if it behaves itself, would pass clean under her and never touch her.
“The trouble is,” he went on, “that there never was a torpedo made that stuck to its course and it is liable to shift to the port or starboard or to come to the surface and for this reason we never take a chance but dodge them. You can always tell when a torpedo is coming by the thin white wake she makes on top of the water and while a ship can’t get out of its way, a speedy little boat like ours can make a quick turn and give it a wide berth.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the wheel revolves sparks are made only when the electrodes on the wheel and those that are fixed around it are exactly in a line. Now instead of a few big sparks taking place every second, a thousand smaller ones occur in a second and this makes a whistling sound which is heard by the operator who is listening in at the distant station. The high frequency currents set up by the spark-gap then surge through an oscillation transformer which increases its pressure and finally into and through the aerial wire system where they are damped out in long electric waves. ”

“ Each chaser is given a certain area to patrol and she works with all the other chasers in her squadron, the shore station and ships at sea. If a U-boat has been sighted at sea, the ship who has picked her up immediately sends a wireless message to the base which in turn informs the commander of the squadron.
Should a U-boat venture into one of our zones the chasers get as busy as hornets and scout around until she either slips away or comes to the top to enable her commander to take a look around through his periscope to see if there is a ship in sight worth using a torpedo on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bill was right there with his semi-automatic and dropped a couple of shells on the deck of the Koln. In less time than it takes to tell it to you our commander had swung our submarine round so that one of her torpedo tubes was pointed directly at the Koln and gave the signal to the officer of the torpedo crew to shoot the torpedo. He turned on the compressed air which drives the torpedo from its tube and it shot out and into the sea. We watched it with all eyes as it traveled like a blue streak under its own power below the surface and dead on for the broadside of the Koln. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A better example of wireless is a lighted lamp and your eye, for in this case the lighted lamp acts as a transmitter and sets up very short waves in the ether, which are called light waves and these likewise travel in every direction. The ether is a substance that is 15 trillion times lighter than the air and it fills the whole universe, and when the electric waves set up by a light in it strike your eye the optic nerve carries the sensation of them to your brain and you see the light. ”

“ You may or may not know it but a fellow can join the navy and live aboard ship a long time and still know but very little about any part of her, except his own particular branch, unless he keeps his eyes and ears open and talks with fellows who know and can and will answer his questions intelligently. Bill was ignorant when it came to book-learning but he knew all about submarines and submarine chasers from their bottoms up.
I had asked him why it was that a torpedo from a U-boat couldn’t hit a submarine chaser and also to tell me something about the fighting qualities of U-boats. ”

“ Since wireless waves tend to radiate in all directions parallel with the surface of the earth from an aerial, it is a very difficult matter to transmit enough energy wirelessly in any one direction to have a sufficient quantity left after it has passed through even a short distance to do useful work such as running a motor.
“As early as 1905 Tesla took out patents for a system of wireless transmission of power in which he proposed to use the free ether of space instead of the ether in and around a wire to guide and carry it. ”

“ As one of the torpedo men used to sing, “Mr. Captain, stop the ship I want to get out and walk,” and, indeed, I would have given my pay and the bonus to boot to have had my old job back again on the chaser. It was all Bill’s fault and I didn’t mind telling him so either.
“I should worry, matey,” he would say, and that’s all the satisfaction I could get out of him.
After the rookies got over being seasick we went out on practise trips when each man was taught all about the machinery and how to work it. This was done so that in case a man was put out of action another could take his place. ”

“ When you consider that the hull of a submarine must be able to stand a pressure of at least 200 pounds to the square inch—as much as a high pressure steam boiler—without collapsing when it is fully submerged it must be clear that the strongest steel plate which can be made must be used.
A steel deck, or superstructure as it is called, covers the top of the hull from bow to stern, nearly, and on its middle sets the conning tower. A steering wheel and compass are fixed to the side of the conning tower so that the boat can be steered from the outside when she is running light or awash. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I assured him.
“Now any kid operator knows,” continued Jack, “that electric waves are radiated to every point of the compass around an aerial and hence even if the waves sent out by it had enough power to go around the world they would meet on the opposite side of the earth and neutralize each other.
“What do you think about signaling from the earth to Mars, Mr. Collins?”
“Not very much. It is never safe to predict, especially to make a negative prediction, by which I mean to say that a thing can’t be done. ”

“ It seemed likely that they worked, part of the time at least, in conjunction with U-boats for whenever a ship went forth armed a torpedo sank her but if she was unarmed the raider’s guns sent her to the bottom.
Uncle Sam was getting mighty tired of this sort of business and so he hatched up a little scheme. A small steamer, the Henrietta, was fitted out without guns, painted a sea-gray and flew the stars and stripes when she was sent to sea. Our submarine was sent with her, not exactly as a convoy for she was not sailing for any overseas port but instead she was sent out simply as a decoy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To get the best results the aerials of two stations communicating with each other should both be vertical or flat-top, that is, a vertical wire will not receive from a flat-top nearly as well as from another one that is vertical and this is just as true the other way about. As all ships are fitted with flat-top aerials and as the Eiffel Tower aerial is neither the one kind nor the other but a sloping aerial and hence would receive from a flat-top as well as from a vertical aerial the Navy Department decided to use the T or flat-top aerial on the Arlington station. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many men may work on a device and none of them hit upon the thing that is needed to make it practical; then some fine day a genius will happen along and see just what the device lacks and add it to the general collection, or he will put something to it, perhaps accidentally, that does the business, and this last touch which enables it to be used gives the man who does it the right to be called its inventor.
Now, dozens of men, including Morse, Edison and Tesla in this country, and Hughes, Pierce and Lodge in England, worked on the scheme of sending messages without wires ”

“ Now, signalling between submerged submarines or a submarine and a chaser is carried on on exactly this same principle, that is by the conduction of sound waves through the water. To do this kind of wireless signalling each submarine has a high-frequency sound producing apparatus, or oscillator as it is called, attached to the hull. It consists of a diaphragm, or disk, that is set into very rapid vibration by means of an electromagnet, just as the diaphragm of a telephone receiver is made to vibrate by its electromagnet. ”

“ A man who knew nothing about wireless but wanted to become an operator was given a course of instruction at some naval wireless school or wireless telegraph shore station and when he was proficient enough he was assigned to a cruising ship either in charge of a station or else as an assistant to the electrician in charge. ”

“ 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. ”