Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
Mustered Out
JACK HEATON and I had just finished our goulash at Moquin’s on Sixth Avenue (New York), and the waiter, under the stimulus of a piece of money, graciously removed the table cloth as he had been asked to do on twelve previous occasions.
I took a couple of quires of blank paper out of my brief case and laid them in front of me; then I produced a pair of fountain pens, one filled with black ink and the other with red ink, the latter for writing on chapter headings and putting in such corrections as might be necessary, and all of which showed without any deduction that I was in for a writing spell.
“Well, Jack, we’ve got down to the last chapter and this sitting will finish it,” I started off encouragingly.
“I’ve told you all my experiences and if there’s any more to be said I guess you’ll have to say it, Mr. Collins,” remarked the bored young soldier.
“No, my boy,” I said firmly, “there are still some outstanding features about wireless I want to talk over with you, and besides I have never turned in a script to my publishers that had less than twelve chapters, that is, except a shorteut arithmetic and the shorter a book of that kind is the better.”
“I don’t know of any outstanding features as you call them; it seems to me I’ve told you everything that ever happened to me. What else can I say?” protested the young man.
“Give me your version of how we met, tell how you looked in that natty overseas uniform, how I looked, what is on your mind now and all that sort of thing. Then we’ll discuss the wireless transmission of power, wireless airships and submarines, talking to Mars and finally about the diamond fields of South America for I’m as interested in them as your friend Bill Adams,” I suggested.
Jack laughed.
“Why, if I painted a word picture of you I’m afraid you and I’d part company.”
“Hardly, my boy, hardly,” I reassured him. “I’ve gone through war, or what war is; I’ve licked a couple of would-be Kaisers myself and I’m going after a few more of them before I have done with life. I am, forsooth, a bit battle scarred but my skin is as thick as that of a rhinoceros. Any little thing that you might say about me I’d be delighted to jot it down.”
“Let’s see,” reflected Jack, “when we left off yesterday I had just been discharged from the hospital and was back with my folks in Montclair. When I was able to get around I wanted to see Broadway and came over one morning with dad. I was feeling bully as I was Strolling down the trail when suddenly I spied a man I once knew although I hadn’t seen him in years, no, not since I was a kid operator learning wireless.
“He was a tall, spare man like yourself, whose legs, as honest Abe once said, were long enough to reach to the ground. He might have been anywhere up to a hundred and five, by which I mean his age and not his weight; at any rate he had surely seen fifty summers and heaven only knows how many hard falls.
“He was slightly stoop-shouldered, which I suspect was due to his sticking to his desk too closely, or, perchance, because he couldn’t shake the weight of his own tragedies from them. His face was pale, quiet and cadaverous, but whatever troubles he may have had and however many, they seemed not to have attacked his hair for it was all there, nearly,—though I didn’t count ’em—with not a gray one to mar their beautiful mouse-like color. In truth, he dressed like you, looked like you and, by gravy, he was you, Mr. Collins.”
Jack laughed heartily at this photo-impression of his old friend and I was glad to know that after all he had gone through with here, there and everywhere and the pain he had suffered and was suffering even then, he was still able to see the humor in so grisly a subject. I laughed, too, just to show him that I had not yet given up the ship and, hence, there was still hope for us both.
“Turn about is fair play and now that you have given a word picture of me I’ll give one of you. As I remember our meeting it was like this: I was hurrying up Broadway one morning when suddenly a young soldier stepped abruptly in front of me thereby barring any farther progress on my part. I observed he had a trim fighting figure and wore the uniform we love so well. He wore puttees and limped somewhat but from the medals he wore on his breast I judged that he had met the enemy and that they were his—and ours.
“His was a fine, heroic face and the very way his over-seas cap set on the side of his head, his smiling eyes, his hearty laugh and the firm, smooth grasp of his hand was enough to show me that he was one of the brave boys from over there who had caught ‘the torch from failing hands and held it high in Flanders fields.’
“‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Collins?’ he cried. “I’m Jack Heaton, and you used to let me make things in your laboratory over in Newark when I was a kid!’
“‘Of course I remember you but, my, how you have grown. I never would have known you. You were rather a frail chap then and now you’re such a powerfully built young fellow.’ And then we talked about you and all your experiences since I last saw you. I told you that you ought to write a book and you said that there wasn’t much to write, and that if it was done I’d have to do it for you.
“Then we agreed we’d collaborate, you to furnish the experiences and I to write them out and I wanted to give you whatever was made from the sale of the book and that I would take the glory of having written it for my share of the profits; but you wouldn’t have it any other way but that we would divvy fifty-fifty.”
“That part was all right,” put in Jack, “but what made a hit with me was that you said you knew a publisher who would take the book and forthwith we drew up a provisional table of contents. Then we went over to your publisher; you explained the idea to the editor and gave him the table of contents and we got the contract the next day. And do you know, Mr. Collins, that my leg began to feel better right away!”
“That was some weeks ago, Jack, but I’ve enjoyed your company so much and have been so interested in what you’ve told me I wish we had it all to do over again. Well, Jack, we must to work again.”
“All right, but before we get busy I want to tell you of a séance I once had with King Solomon. Do you believe in spirits—in wireless spirits?”
“Heard of all kinds of wireless and several kinds of spirits but don’t know the breed called wireless spirits,” I admitted.
“I was introduced to one in London. One evening an operator from one of the Red Star liners who was interested in magic, spiritualism and all that sort of thing, wanted me to go with him to see a performance of Maskelyn and Devant’s Mysteries at St. George’s Hall in Langham Place, W. C.
“The mysteries of these mystifiers were mystical enough to mystify the most mysterious and I saw everything from the wonderful East Indian rope trick to the equally wonderful spirit rapping table. David Devant, the celebrated conjurer, exhibited the table and he said—and nobody in the audience disputed him—that the table possessed the ghostly property of connecting this world with the next, the quick with the dead, that which is now with that which is to be, and that it would rap out answers to any questions which might be asked to prove it.
“Some of the wiseacres present laughed lightly at the conjurer’s immaterial remarks but he assured them on his honor as a gentleman its guiding spirit was no lesser an (astral) light than that of old King Solomon himself. Thereupon Mr. Devant invited the audience to ply the immortal part of the departed wise man with any questions that might be fit and proper.
“Strangely enough while nobody believed in spirit communications as exemplified by the rapping table everybody was most anxious to ask some question which no one on this side of the borderland could answer. The replies that King Solomon rapped out were deep and philosophical although not always conforming to our ideas of ethics and morals. Indeed, his very first reply to a question, which was put by some guileless suffragette, nearly broke up the show. She asked him, as Bill Adams would say ‘as man to man,’ how many wives a man should have, and in that she thought she had trapped him even though he was beyond the pale of the law. But Solomon showed his superior wisdom as usual and rebuked the lady by rapping furiously on the table until he had nearly eight hundred wives to his credit.
“To convinee the audience that the table was just a common, single legged, three footed one of the milliner’s variety the conjurer invited a committee to step up on the stage and examine it; I went up with several other men and we nearly had a private séance with old Sol. We examined the table and found it O. K.; to me it seemed a little top heavy but I made due allowance for this because King Solomon was a brainy man.
“Now when the conjurer held it at arm’s length, or I did so as one of the committee, it kept right on rapping out replies from the gone but not forgotten spirit of the ancient King. Even when the table was passed through the audience—”
“You mean among the audience, don’t you, Jack? Even a spirit table would have hard work passing through the audience.”
“I stand corrected. HEyven when the table was passed among the audience it kept up its dark rappings to the great enjoyment of the audience. To me the rappings had a more or less mechanical sound as if King Solomon’s knuckles had turned to spirit gold, or common brass would do.
“I figured it out that the raps were done wirelessly, by which I mean that the top of the table was hollow and contained a small but sensitive receiver with a single stroke tapper and as the top of the table was made of a sheet of burnished copper and the three footed base was of iron with the connecting leg between them of wood it seemed reasonable to suppose that these formed the aerial and ground.
“Although I listened hard I couldn’t hear the faintest sound of a spark-gap working but it is an easy matter to put the transmitter in a sound-proof booth.’’
“And thus doth a little science make big skeptics of us all. Now tell our young readers, Jack, how S O S came to take the place of C Q D, as the ambulance call of the sea.”’
“It came about in this way. In 1896 the International Wireless Telegraph Convention was held in Berlin. Germany’s wireless men, from her greatest scientists down to her lowly operators hated anything that had to do with or was used by Marconi, so instead of C Q D, they suggested that the letters S O S be used. Unlike C Q D, the letters S O S have no especial meaning in themselves but they are easy to send and to read and make, as a matter of fact, a good distress call.
“While S O S, was probably sent out many times by various operators from that time on it did not become famous until the S. S. Kentucky went down off the Diamond Shoals. Her operator did as many an operator had done before him and has done since, that is, he kept sending the S O S call. Her engine room was rapidly filling with water but before her dynamos were submerged and put out of commission the operator on the Alamo of the Mallory Line, ninety miles away, heard the call. The Alamo reached the sinking ship just in time to save her passengers and crew before she went down.”
“Do you think it is possible to send a wireless message around the world?”
“Not without relaying it. You remember back there in 1909 when all the small fry who were following in Marconi’s footsteps were trying to do something more wonderful than the great inventor? One of them made the statement that he had sent out a train of electric waves from his high power station which traveled completely round the world and in a small fraction of a second he received the signals on the same aerial; and he was backed up in it by a college professor, too.”
“I agree with you that college professors may sometimes be wrong, indeed they are nearly always so,” 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. Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer and mathematician, proved by figures and the known laws of nature, to his own satisfaction and a good many others, that it was a physical impossibility to build a man-carrying airplane.
“Langley who was just as big a figure in the world of science believed that the thing could be done, built model after model that flew but when he built his big machine to be piloted by a man it fell before it got fairly into the air. Yet the same year that he failed, the Wright Brothers, a couple of bicycle mechanics, put a gasoline engine in a glider and flew. Since then bombing airplanes have been built that will carry a ton or more.
“The moral is that if you must predict it is better to do so in favor of rather than against a proposition unless you’re betting on a horse. My opinion is that signaling to Mars will not be done by long electric waves set up by electric sparks. Some years ago Tesla, the electrician, was reported to have received signals from Mars by long electric waves, that is wireless waves, while Pickering the astronomer got up a plan to reflect signals to the red planet by short electric, that is light waves. All he needed to do it with was ten million dollars’ worth of mirrors and by forming these into a gigantic reflector he opined he could concentrate the light of the sun into a beam and throw it on the surface of Mars.
“And this puts me in mind of Tesla’s scheme to transmit power wirelessly. To transmit power to run machinery and to control power at a distance by wireless are two entirely different things. Since wireless waves tend to radiate in all directions parallel with the surface of the earth from an aerial, it is a very diffi-cult 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. He built a great tower at Wardencliff, Long Island, New York, for the purpose of radiating power but nothing came of the experiments he made and after some years the tower was torn down.”
“You don’t believe then that it will ever be possible to transmit energy for power purposes by wireless?”
“On the contrary, I believe it is possible but other discoveries must be made before it can be done successfully and this is also true of many other things which have been and are still looked upon as physical impossibilities. As to controlling apparatus at a distance by wireless that is, of course, just as easy as sending a signal, in fact it’s the same thing.
“Tesla was the first to control the movements of a boat at a distance by wireless and after him came many others. Even submarines have been so equipped and controlled but since the surface of the sea reflects most of the energy of the waves and absorbs the rest of it the boat must have its aerial above the surface at all times or the waves will not reach it.
“Attempts to control airships by wireless have been made time without number but to no useful purpose for no effective distance can be had between an airship and the sending station. Even sending wireless messages from airplanes as you said yesterday is only done over a very short distance and these limits are quickly reached because there is no way of grounding it.”
“How do you think the distance could be increased?” Jack wanted to know.
“You are asking a hard question, my boy. It might be done by finding a certain length of wave that would have a carrying capacity through the ether comparable to that of light, yet be longer than a light wave and shorter than the wireless waves we use for transmitting over land and sea. But this is sheer speculation on my part. Well, Jack, we’re all done and you see it wasn’t such a hard job as you thought. Before we go, though, I should like to know just what you expect to do in the future.”
“Really, I don’t know, Mr. Collins, though I’ve been thinking pretty hard about it lately, too. You see, I’ve reached an age where I’ve got to boil down to business and make some money, but I don’t want any of that swivel-chair-at-a-desk-on-the-’steenth-floor-of-an-office-building for mine. I’d get into the airplane game but there’s no more money in it than there is in wireless.
“My one best thought is to get a little party together, go down to Brazil and open up a diamond mine,” and he looked fondly at the glittering stone in his ring.
“What I’d like to do is to get Bill Adams and a few other kindred spirits to go with me, clean out the Capunicas, and,” his eyes bright-ened, “if you’ll join us I’ll make you King of the cannibals instead of old Oopla.”
“Declined with thanks,” I bowed regally, that is as regally as a man can bow whose back is already bent. “I haven’t the slightest desire to king it over any tribe of man-eaters, but if you will let me go with you in the capacity of adviser, medicine man and book-maker I’ll consider it.”
“Done, signed and sealed,” said Jack and we shook hands till we should get together on the proposition.
The End