Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 1
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 5×7 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 wave length 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.
Bob took the receivers from his head and laid them on the table. I tell you we were an
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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 emis-sion, 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.