Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
My First Job as an Operator
JUST before the Christmas holidays my father, who was the New York manager of the Singer Crude Oil Engine Company, told mother and me that he had to make a business trip to Nicaragua.
There was nothing exciting in this announcement for dad went off on business trips quite often, but when he said that he would take us with him and we’d go by steamer I immediately sat up and took notice, for I had wanted to make a sea voyage ever since I could remember.
It may seem a little queer but although I lived almost within sight of the old Atlantic and picked up messages right along from coast liners, the only trip I had ever made was on a little steam launch that takes unwary pleasure victims from Asbury Park outbound toward Europe for about ten miles, or until every one’s gizzard is turned wrong-side-out (much to the delight of the fishes) and back again.
I said every one was sea-sick nigh unto death but as a matter of fact there were just three human beings aboard the Snail that were able to step ashore like sober folks and walk a fairly straight line. I don’t want to do any bragging but these sole survivors of mal-de-mer were the captain and the engineer, who made up the crew, and yours truly.
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.
For the next few days everything around home was a hurry-up place—like going away for the summer—and I was mighty glad when at last we took the Erie (not weary) railroad for Jersey City, where the Pan-American Line had its docks. Once there, a couple of porters relieved us of our numerous pieces of hand baggage, and trailing along in the rear of dad and mom, I came aboard feeling like a duke.
After we were shown our staterooms by the steward I made a bee-line for the wireless room, but found it locked, the operator not yet having put in an appearance. To kill time till he came I went up on the hurricane deck, that is the upper deck, to take a look at the aerial.
It was formed of a couple of parallel wires about 200 feet long suspended between the masts and insulated from them by strain insulators of the kind that was then known as the Navy type. I was standing close to one of the funnels looking up at the aerial, which seemed to me to be a middling one—I had seen better and worse in Montclair—when all of a sudden there was a terrific noise set up and for a second I failed to cohere—that is I was nearly scared stiff. Inan instant my jigger was right again, for it was only the ship’s whistle blowing its deep throated blast to let those who had come aboard to say good-by to their friends who were sailing, know that it was time to go ashore, and to those ashore who wanted to take the boat know that they had better get a move on them if they expected to make it.
When I got back to the wireless room there was quite a collection of people crowded around the little window, but whether for the purpose of sending messages or out of curiosity I didn’t know. I stood about as much chance of getting up to that window as a fellow has of getting on a subway express at Brooklyn Bridge during the rush hour.
I went away in disgust and didn’t go back again until we had sailed down the river, passed through the Narrows and had dropped the pilot out at sea.
Suddenly I heard the ze—ze—zip—zip—zippy snap of the sparks of the transmitter as the operator began to send, and I rushed madly to the wireless room. As I ran down the passageway I read—. . . .—that is B R T, B R T, B R T, at intervals of every two or three minutes; B R T was the call letter of some shore station that the operator was trying to get, but without my book, which gave the call letters of the different ship and shore stations, I couldn’t tell which one it was.
You know, of course, that when a vessel wants to talk to a station either on ship or shore the first thing the operator does is to listen-in—to make sure that he will not interfere with messages that are being exchanged between other stations within his range. If the ether isn’t too busy he then sends the call letter of the station he wants.
On reaching the wireless room I found a bigger crowd congregated around the window than ever for the zip—zippy crackle of the sparks as they broke down the air between the spark-gap electrodes had attracted the curious even as honey attracts insects of the Musca domestica family, i.e., houseflies, and I couldn’t get within six feet of it.
There was a short lull while the operator looked over a message which a little man with red hair and a pepper and salt suit had written out. When the operator started to send again I read off the name of our ship, the state of the weather and the number of words he intended to send, all of which was in accordance with the regular routine prescribed by the rules and regulations of the company for governing communications by wireless between ships and shore stations. The message ran like this:
For fear you may not know the Morse code which was used by all coastwise steamers in those early days, I will do it into English for you.
S G, which I afterwards looked up, was, I found, a station at Sea Gate which was on the coast. Vinalos was the name of our ship. Fine meant the state of the weather. Fifteen indicated the number of words the message contained.
I laughed at the man who forgot, but nobody else laughed because there was probably not one among them who knew the difference between a binding post and an electric wave.
All of that afternoon I read the outgoing messages, but I felt I was losing something by not getting what was coming in. Then a bril-liant idea struck me and I immediately proceeded to put it into execution with the result that it almost electrocuted me.
I took out my little portable receiving set, hooked a wire to the detector and the other end to the electric light fixture for a ground which, from what I had read about ship stations, I had reason to believe made a connection with the steel hull of the ship. Being so close to the 2 kilowatt (about 2½ horsepower) transmitter, one side of the spark-gap of which also made connection with the hull, I hadn’t the slightest doubt but that I could receive without an aerial and I certainly did, but the kind wasn’t right.
No sooner had I put on my head-phones and my fingers on the adjusting screw of the detector than zip, zum, bang, boom, and I received a terrific shock that lifted me clear off the edge of my bunk; I hung suspended in midair ’tween decks (or so it seemed) and to give verisimilitude to the levitation act, I recoiled like a 12-inch gun and hit the floor with a dull thud. I was glad the man I laughed at because he forgot, was not there to laugh at the fellow who didn’t know.
When I had fully come to and was able to use my thinker again I knocked the wire off of the electric light fixture and then proceeded to examine my receiver to see if anything had been damaged. Beyond burning off the point of my detector there was no scathe done, and I overhauled it and put the instrument back in its box.
My next move was to see the operator and hold some small wireless talk with him. It was now late in the afternoon and when I got back it overjoyed me to find that the crowd who hungered to penetrate the mystery of sending messages without wires had fathomed its very depths and departed, that is, all except one young couple who were from Missouri, according to the passenger list, and of course they must needs be shown.
The moment I saw the operator’s face I set him down for one of those fresh young fellows you meet everywhere and I did not miss my guess. Now you would hardly believe it, but it is nevertheless true, that there are a few operators who think it smart and a great joke to tell land-lubbers anything but the truth whenever they are questioned about wireless.
“What I can’t understand,” said the young woman, “is how you can send out a wireless message when the wind is blowing so hard.”
If the operator had been even a 14-carat gentleman he would have told her that when he works the key a low pressure current of electricity is broken up into dots and dashes representing letters and that this intermittent current flowing through the coil of the transmitter is changed into high frequency oscillations by the spark; the oscillations then surge through the aerial wire and their energy is emitted from the aerial in the form of electric waves. These electric waves are exactly the same as light waves, except that they are very much longer, and both are transmitted by, in and through the ether. Hence the wind, which is air in motion, has nothing at all to do with it.
This would have been the real scientific explanation of how a message is sent and while it would, more than likely, have been as clear as mud to her young inquiring mind, still if she could not grasp the true explanation of how it works it would have been her misfortune and not the operator’s fault. See?
But did he tell the lady straight? You could have told from his physiog that he would not. Instead he went on at great length and framed up a story of how the wind had once blown a message he had sent far out of its course and then suddenly veering round it blew it back again and he caught his own message several minutes later when he was listening-in for the reply. This he claimed, with great seriousness was due to the low power of his instruments and a fouled aerial.
“Are you having any trouble now on account of the wind?” continued the young woman deeply interested.
“None at all, because you see I am using a four horsepower spark and I have just had my aerial sandpapered and oiled and the waves slip off without the slightest difficulty.”
This little speech gave me another shock, but I had a third one coming and forthwith got it.
“How are they coming in?” I asked, leaning against the window after the couple had gone.
“What do you mean?” he questioned as he looked at me through half closed eyes in a way I didn’t fancy.
“Why the messages?”
“Through the window,” he returned shortly, and went back to his key.
I stuck around the window and took a good look at the instruments which to my way of thinking weren’t much, in fact a lot of fellows in Montclair had outfits that put his way in the shade except that they were not as powerful. I couldn’t see why he was so swelled on himself.
He began calling again and after he had put through his message I repeated it out loud as though I was talking to myself, just to let him know that I knew.
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. 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. So hotfoot it and don’t hang around here any more.”
This was too much for even a fellow with a cast-iron nerve like mine, so I turned on my heel, said sore-head under my breath and took a walk on the promenade deck. He was the first professional operator I had ever met and I was certainly disappointed in the way he treated a brother operator. I wondered then if all professional operators had his kind of a grouch and if so, I didn’t want to be one of them.
Not to be out-generaled I thought I’d try one more scheme and that was to use a couple of pieces of wire five or six feet long for the aerial and ground, hook them on to the detector of
my receiver, fix the free end of the aerial over the window and lay the free end of the ground wire on the floor. In this way there would be no direct metal connection between his transmitter and my receiver.
The waves from his set were so powerful that they easily bridged the gap and I listened-in whenever I wanted to and knew everybody’s business on board all the way down to Realjo. But I kept away from the wireless room and that operator. Before we landed I found out from the second officer that the operator was only a substitute for the regular one and that it was the second trip he had ever made.
After a stay of a couple of weeks in Realjo we started back for New York on the Almirante. I didn’t know whether to tackle making friends with the operator or not. I had swallowed a pretty bitter wireless pill on the way down and didn’t care about repeating the dose.
The second day out I ventured close enough to the instrument room to see what the outfit looked like and to size up the operator in charge.
He was a big fellow with a full rounded face and every little while he would whistle a popular air which fitted in nicely with the bright sunshine that flooded the room. At the same time he would listen-in and finally he sent O. K., which in the wireless code means that he had heard the operator of the distant station who was calling him and that he was ready to take his message.
Of course I couldn’t tell what was coming in but I was aching to put those head-phones on just once. When he had finished writing out the message he put it in an envelope and started to leave the room. Spotting me standing by he beamed pleasantly.
“Oh! I say, boy, I wonder if you would be so kind and condescending as to take this message to the Captain? Some other messages are likely to come in and I don’t want to leave my post.”
Would I carry a message to the Captain? Why I’d carry one to the King of Abyssinia for a pleasant word from any professional operator. I felt that there was my chance to get a stand-in with his royal highness, the wireless man.
After delivering the message to the Captain I returned with alacrity to the window of the wireless room. The operator loosened up but I didn’t tell him I was one of those fellows too. I had learned at first hand that professional operators hadn’t any use for wireless kids and that the only way to be friends with one was to be as dumb as a clam as far as wireless was concerned.
This scheme worked out fine for after some talk he asked me of his own accord if I’d like to take a look at the apparatus. He opened the door and told me to “come right in” although on a card tacked on the wall in plain sight was printed this legend:
Service Regulations for Operators.
And this was followed by a dozen or more other rules and regulations.
When I got inside the room the operator, whose name was Bathwick, began pointing out which part of the apparatus was the sender and which made up the receiver; this was the key; that the sending tuning coil, over here the condenser; under the table the transformer; on the wall the spark-gap; and altogether these make up the transmitter. This the crystal detector, the potentiometer, the tuning coil, the variable condenser and the head-phones make up the receiver and, finally the aerial switch, or throwover switch as it is called, the purpose of which is to enable the operator to connect the aerial with the transmitter or the receiver, depending on whether he wants to send or to receive.
I acted as if I had never seen a wireless set before; all went well until he had finished and then I let the cat out of the bag. He had a peculiar kind of a loose-coupled tuning coil that I had never seen before and I asked him how it was wound. He grinned at me with his big mouth and blue eyes and put out his open hand, palm side up.
“Put it there, pal,” he said. “I was a wireless kid myself once.” We shook hands and it put me next to the fact that all professional operators are not alike and at the same time it gave me a pass to the wireless room whenever I wanted it. I almost lived there the rest of the voyage.
Harry—I mean Bathwick—and I got so thick we began calling each other by our first names. He let me listen-in whenever I wanted to, and then after telling me all about the service regulations that had to do with the order in which the messages were sent, he let me try my hand at sending.
One night when we were off Cape Hatteras and a furious gale was blowing Harry got suddenly sick and as this is the worst part of the whole trip the Captain was in a quandary about. his wireless messages. Harry told him that I could work the instruments and to put me in his place. The Captain seemed doubtful at first because of my age, but there was nothing else he could do.
Naturally I made a few mistakes but at that I was pretty successful and I had the distinction, so the Captain told my father, of being the youngest operator on board ship on record.
Well, the gist of it all was that when I graduated from High School in the spring and wanted a job as an operator I made application to the United Wireless Company, which at that time controlled about all the coastwise steamers, and, armed with a letter of recommendation from Captain Harding of the Almirante, I got it on the good ship Carlos Madino.
The year I was the operator on this ship I visited many Central American ports. I became more and more imbued with the desire to see farther around the corners of the great round world and I think I can safely say I have done so in a fairly creditable manner.