Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/163

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
A Government Operator
139

ing it to my collection but to go to Paris direct and get the Eiffel Tower station instead.

In this choice I was perhaps influenced somewhat by getting a job as second wireless officer on the Kronprinzessin Cecilie, a fine fast passenger express steamer of the North German Lloyd Line. This German ship—as in fact all other transatlantic liners—was equipped with the Marconi system and this grouched the German officers to the last limits of despair. A little newspaper was published on board every day and, of course, the news in it came via wireless. Whenever we had trouble in getting the messages from the stations at Well-fleet, Mass., or Poldhu, England—as was always the case more or less when we were in mid-ocean—the paper which the Germans ran printed them anyway just as we took them down, and then they commented on what a rotten system Marconi’s was.

The Kronprinzessin Cecilie touched at Plymouth, England, and then sailed across the English channel and touched again at Cherbourg, France, where I threw up the job, as my destination was Paris, and I arrived there a few hours later.