Radioman

“ The classrooms and laboratories of the officer-students were in the same building as those of the enlisted men. Officers and men alike had gone through the same preliminary tests, but now their paths separated. March saw the men regularly, of course, in the halls and around the grounds. He stopped and chatted once in a while with Scott, the radioman, who struck him more and more as a pleasant and serious young man ideally suited to submarine work. He saw the pharmacist, Sallini, and also Marty Cobden, the fellow who had gone to pieces at the fifty-foot level in the escape tower. ”

“ In these days a man-of-war without a radio-room would be almost deaf, dumb, and blind. We knew that we were actually in the war when the distress calls from sinking ships or those which were under attack by submarines began to come hurtling through the air. This in itself was enough to prove the priceless value of the radio in saving life. For some time I kept a chart upon which were plotted all the positions of vessels which transmitted radio calls for help, but within two months so many of these calls had been received that I had little space left in which to record the new ones. ”

“ The aerial was there, towering as serenely against the slaty sky as though there was no such thing as a snowstorm. The great marvel of radio! For no wires, other than the antenna, were needed to carry its messages to the farthermost parts of the world!
For a moment the boys were awed as the real significance of the modern miracle was borne home to them. It was magnificent, it was inspiring merely to have the privilege of living in such an age.
“Well, Mr. Salper doesn’t need to worry,” said Joe, at last. “There’s always radio on the job if he wants to get a quick message through to New York.” ”

“ I told him about my visitor and the repair job. "What I did was add a modulator-oscillator-power amplifier, and a few feet of wire for an antenna, coiled around inside the case."
"So what does that make it?"
"Simple. It makes it a radio transmitter. Not only will he hear what the horses are saying, but anyone in town with a radio tuned to that frequency will, too."
"And where does that get you?" The sergeant was still puzzled but not bored now. ”

“ From the telephone to radio constituted but another such step, and we are now enjoying radio broadcast from stations thousands of miles away. Every time you have an Xray photograph taken you are bombarded, not by rays, but by actual particles that go right through the walls of the tube, which particles are just as real as if they were bullets or bricks, the only difference being that they are smaller. Thus our scientists lead up to the way of sending solids through space. ”

“ When a sub is heard and located, the listeners call the net-layers by radio, and they go to the spot at a thirty-knot speed. As they approach they soon drown out the sound of the sub, but their speed and number enables them to surround the area in which she is known to be, for she won’t have time to go far from where she was last heard. Paying out their nets, they hem her in and keep the ring of nets closed round her till the area is raked with trailing wires and other electromagnetic detectors which will enable the chasers to concentrate their depth charges with the certainty of a kill. ”

“ I guess the human race will never have power by radio. Probably we will be able to get along without it. Atomic power seems to be coming along, and it's safe.
I took Fradin to the hospital. That slug through his shoulder had cost him a lot of blood, but he recovered all right, only to discover that the Institute of Radio Engineers had booted him right out of their organization, for making the preposterous claim that radio waves are transmitted through the fourth dimension instead of through the ether. ”

“ He cleared his throat and looked around with his well-known lecture-room air.
“Now that the author of the strange phenomena which have confronted us in this house has been apprehended,” he said, “explanations, and such further investigations as are needed to completely clear up the mystery, are in order.
“You are all aware that the manifestations we have witnessed were under the control of an operator established in an old farmhouse eight miles west of here, and that the mechanism he used was a powerful and complicated radio set. ”

“ So I’ll say it all in one sentence—the radio is the most wonderful invention ever conceived by the mind of man.”
“You don’t need to prove it to us,” laughed Bob. “It’s simply a miracle, and we become more convinced of that every day. I’m mighty glad I was born in this age of the world.”
The boys crowded around Mr. Harvey as he explained to Larry and Tim in as simple a way as possible the radio apparatus of the station. ”

“ Directly behind the house we unwrapped two of the packages. One proved to be a set of surveyor’s instruments which the civil engineer quickly assembled. The other looked very much like a radio set with its loop aerials and dials, although there was no speaker or headphone with it. The radio set was placed on a small folding table, and Mr. Easton sighted from that point, while I acted as roadman and Mr. Brandon as chainman. We measured off a distance of two thousand feet in a straight line along the beach, the doctor following with the other package. ”

“ It is not generally known that, during the War, experiments were made with a sound-reflector for listening to different types of aeroplane and submarine, by means of a microphone placed at the centre of a concave mirror. The difficulty was that of distortion, which is the whole source of trouble with sound producers to-day. Distance is no difficulty and when we can obtain purity and realism as well as distance, the latter is no difficulty at all; then [Pg 35] only will be the time when we shall have that spontaneous mental realism of vision that will help radio to alter the world. ”

“ By the time those persons heard it, the man in the moon could have heard it too—that is,” he added, with a laugh, “supposing there really were a man in the moon and that he had a radio receiving set.”
“It surely sounds like fairyland,” murmured Joe.
“Radio is the fairyland of science,” replied Mr. Preston, with enthusiasm, “in the sense that it is full of wonder and romance. But there the similarity ceases. Fairyland is a creation of the 15 fancy or the imagination. Radio is based upon the solid rock of scientific truth. Its principles are as certain as those of mathematics. ”

“ The winning of the prizes, the first by Bob and the second by Joe, with honorable mention for Jimmy, was a spur to fresh efforts in mastering the wonders of radio. This they carried out at Ocean Point, a seashore resort, at which they spent their vacation. How they advanced to the use of the vacuum tube receiving set from their first crystal set; their experiences in the wireless room of a seashore station; their narrow escape from death on the night of a roaring gale ”

“ It was the first opportunity the boys had had to tell the doctor of the night when Bob found that he was a human aerial, and he listened to the many details of the experiment with absorbed interest.
“It’s something new to me,” he said. “You boys have reason to be gratified at having had a novel experience. That’s the beauty of radio. Something new is always cropping up. Many of the other sciences have been more or less fully explored, and while none of them will ever be 58 exhausted, their limits have been to some extent indicated. ”

“ Not by any means.”
“But radio turned the trick just the same,” said Bob slangily. “I’ve read that a message that used to take two days to pass between ranger stations can be sent now in a few seconds.”
“Right!” exclaimed Mr. Bentley, his eyes glinting. “In a little while the saving in the cost of forest fires will more than pay for the installation of radio. We nose out a fire and send word by wireless to the nearest station, before the fire fairly knows it’s started.”
“But just what is it that you do?” asked Joe, with flattering eagerness. ”

“ Now, think of the thousands of people in this country who use radio receiving sets. They can tune them, after a fashion; they hear over long distances, mostly because of luck, and so they think themselves scientific research workers, and speak of their sets, which really do all the work, contemptuously—patronizingly. Yet those same sets, even if they have built them themselves (which is not usually the case) are really miracles to them, if they would only admit it.”
“All done?” Stan inquired solicitously.
“All done,” said Dick, wonderingly. ”

“ The radio-telephone does not transmit the human voice. It reproduces near the ears of the listener similar motions of the air molecules and hence causes in the ears of the listener the same sensations of sound as if he were listening directly to the speaker. This reproduction takes place almost instantaneously so great is the speed with which the electrical effects travel outward from the sending antenna. If you wish to understand radio-telephony you must know something of the mechanism by which the voice is produced and something of the peculiar or characteristic properties of voice sounds. ”

“ There’s something about this wireless that grips a fellow. Work seems like play.”
“Same here,” said Joe. “I guess we’re thirty-third degree radio fans all right. I find myself talking radio, thinking radio, dreaming radio. If there was any such thing as radio breakfast food I’d be eating it.”
“I’m afraid we’ll get thin if we wait for that,” laughed Bob, picking up his hammer and resuming work on the aerial that they were stringing on the top of his father’s barn. ”

“ If you follow directions carefully. And with the new outfit a loop is just as effective an antenna as an outside aerial. They say, too, that to catch broadcasting for not more than twenty-five miles, not even a loop is needed, the circuits themselves acting as the absorbers of energy.”
“I’m going to try it,” declared Jessie, with more confidence. “But I feel that I understand so little about the various forms of radio, after all.”
“You have nothing on me there,” laughed the operator. “I am learning something new all the time. ”

“ It had been set up by Dr. Dale himself, and that was proof enough for the boys that it had worked perfectly in sending out the morning service.
“What will radio do next?” asked Bob, as the boys were walking homeward.
“What won’t it do next is the way you ought to put it,” suggested Joe. “It seems as if there were no limit. There are no such things as space and distance any more. Radio has wiped them out completely.”
“That’s true,” chimed in Herb. “The earth used to be a monstrous big thing twenty-five thousand miles round. Now it’s getting to be no bigger than an orange.” ”

“ I tell you, boys, we haven’t half begun to realize what the discovery of radio means to the world.
“Now all this leads us back to vacuum tubes, for it’s only with them that all these things would be possible. Perhaps in the future something better yet will be invented, but they’re the best we have at present. I’m heartily in favor of you boys using a tube instead of a crystal, because it will give you vastly more enjoyment in your work. ”

“ But in radio we’re standing just on the threshold of a science whose infinite possibilities have not even been guessed. One discovery crowds so closely on the heels of another that we have all we can do to keep track of them.
“I’ve just got back from a little trip up in New York State,” he went on, as he settled himself more comfortably in his chair, “and I stopped off at Schenectady to look over the big radio station there. By great good luck, Marconi happened to be there on the same day——”
“Marconi!” breathed Bob. “The father of wireless!”
“Yes,” smiled Dr. Dale. ”

“ There always seems to be something new coming up that you have to work out.”
“If I keep on getting good pay from the broadcasting station, I’ll be able to buy a set, anyway,” said Larry. “What’s the use of working so hard over one, when you can buy them all made up? All you have to do is hook them up to a small antenna, and you get your music right off the bat.”
But the radio boys all scouted this idea.
“Of course you can buy one all made up,” said Bob. “But there’s not half the fun in operating that kind of set as there is in one that you’ve made yourself. ”

“ And new means for modulating electric current by changing light values may be expected when the American boy starts to play with this new toy.
There has been a veritable army of engineers engaged in the development of radio as a service to the ear, while relatively few engineers have been developing radio as a service to the eye.
It is believed that the distant electric modulation of light for many purposes will soon become a common phenomena and eventually of inestimable service in science, in engineering, in industry, and in the home. ”

“ The parlor was red in the fading light, and the hall beyond the sliding doors was deeply shadowed. In the sewing room, he remembered, in the drawers of the treadle machine the radio was captured. The rings and secret manuals of the days when radio had been alive. ”

“ Joe went on. “I don’t see why that can’t really be done in a few years. Why, they say that this new power vacuum tube which handles fifty K. W. is not any larger than a desk drawer.”
“I see the day of the vest-pocket radio set coming nearer and nearer, according to you fellows,” announced Herb. “Pretty soon we’ll be getting our apparatus so small we’ll need a microscope to see it.”
“Laugh if you want to,” said Bob. “But I bet in the next few years we’re going to see greater things done in radio than have been accomplished yet.” ”

“ We raided your room and took therefrom your radio sending and receiving outfit, and have added thereto necessary equipment for erecting an aerial. This we leave with you in order that you may summon help through the atmosphere. Meanwhile, you may comfort yourself with the distinction of being the first college freshman ever given a radio hazing. Now, put up your aerial and send out a message for help. Radio is your only hope. Nobody ever stops at this island and it is impossible for passing vessels to see any signal of distress you may devise. ”