The Radio Operator Saved the Passenger’s Lives

Today’s installment concludes Radios’ First Triumph,
the name of our combined selection from Edward J. Wheeler, Gugllelmo Marconi, and Arthur D. H. Smith. The concluding installment, by Arthur D. H. Smith from an article in Putnam’s Magazine.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed selections from the great works of six thousand words. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Radios’ First Triumph.

Time: 1909
Place: Mid Atlantic

[Tattersall’s story continues}

At last, when we were within forty miles of their position, I began to be able to make out words from the buzzes in the receiver — scattered, senseless syllables to begin with, and then whole phrases and sentences. They gave me their position, and I answered that we were coming as fast as we could steam through the fog.

Was I excited? No; it’s the awful nervous strain of striving, always striving, to get the messages right, when half a dozen gigantic batteries are jerking flashes to you at the same time, drowning each other out, pounding in your ears, making the night seem to swarm with sparks before your eyes. That’s what gets on a man’s nerves; that’s what makes you next to insane. I hardly knew what to do, with the Republic calling me faintly, so faintly that I could not make out whether they were saying: ‘We are sinking!’ or ‘All safe!’

Sometimes, I wanted to swear at Siasconset or Woods Hole. It made me angry that they couldn’t realize they were spoiling my receiving. How could I take those flutters from the Republic’s wires, when they were crashing out their sparks powerful enough to travel two hundred miles? “

There is nothing at all romantic-looking about Tattersall. He is a little, slim, red-whiskered Londoner, as quick and limber as a cat. And, strange to say, he is bashful about what he has done. It is not easy to make him talk about himself, and when he realizes that he has been led into such a digression, he blushes and stammers like a schoolgirl. “Jack” Binns is the same sort of man — young, boyish, quite immature in appearance, but possessed of the identical iron nerve and dauntless resolution that kept Tattersall at his post for more than two days.

He took it as a matter of course that he should be the last man to leave the sinking Republic, except her captain, and the second officer, who insisted on remaining with his chief. It was Binns, too, who held his broken instrument together with one hand, while with the other he rapped the cry for help. Of this, he made light, afterward. It was nothing, he insisted, with a cheery grin. “Any fellow could do that much,” he declared.

Binns and Tattersall are like most of the other operators on the transatlantic liners, in that they are young. Somehow or other, the wireless trade seems to be attractive to youth. It is not because men do not last long at it. It is a hearty and healthy, though strenuous, occupation, and gives a man bracing air in his off-hours. Yet the constant change and excitement incidental to it are factors that appeal to youth. That is the reason most of the men in the trim blue uniforms who have charge of the network of wires that criss-cross between the masts are under thirty.

On all big steamships, like the Republic and the Baltic, there are two, if not three, operators. The rules say nothing explicit about what a head operator shall do in time of stress and danger. Yet the words of Tattersall, shot through the murk that shrouded the sea, were pregnant with the spirit of the wireless operator.

He had a mate at hand who could have relieved him of his task, a task from which he never swerved, save to gulp a cup of coffee or eat a roll, while he chewed on a black cigar and tapped away all through the weary hours. But it was not in accordance with his idea of the duty of a chief operator to leave to a subordinate the responsibility that devolved upon the wireless in that time of suspense.

In the years that have passed since wireless apparatus became a recognized part of a sea-going vessel’s equipment, much improvement has taken place in the methods of sending and receiving. The open-mouthed wonder of the men who stood at Marconi’s side at Glace Bay, four years ago, and heard him taking down a message from the storm-beaten Umbria, hundreds of miles away, would now be regarded as a thing to laugh at. We are used to such trivial marvels. The Federal Government is advertising for bids for the construction of a station at Washington capable of maintaining communication within a radius of 1,000 miles. The Eiffel Tower station in Paris already receives messages from the same distance; and communication between the coasts of Newfoundland and Ireland is an established fact.

One can hardly overemphasize the development of the science. It was so recently as 1895 that Marconi sent his first message two miles. Regarded seven years ago in the light of a toy — as a questionable practical adjunct to man’s power — it has since leaped into position as one of the most useful inventions vouchsafed by modern science. Probably Marconi himself was pleasurably surprised when he first sent a message fifty miles. It was but the other day that the station on Russian Hill, San Francisco, established communication with the Kuhuhu station on the island of Oahu, 2,100 nautical miles distant. And this year the Navy expects to transmit messages 3,000 miles!

A German wireless company claims to have sent messages 2,290 miles, and it is a common thing for the Marconi operators to flash dispatches across the Atlantic — so common that some of the newspapers now publish a special page of wireless news in their Sunday edition. While the battleship fleet was in the Pacific, certain messages flashed from the men-o’-war to the California land-stations were received by the operator at the Pensacola Navy Yard. Think of that! Those communications had passed through the ether, over many miles of tumbling blue water, across the Sierra Nevada, the hot sand-wastes of the southwest, the broad Texas prairies and the Gulf of Mexico, to the station on the Florida shore.

In the American Navy, use of the wireless plays an important part in all battle maneuvers, and experiments are being conducted by the Army Signal Corps with a view to employing it as an adjunct to the field telegraph and telephone, as well as providing a means of communication between war- balloons and air-ships and the earth. In future campaigns on land or sea, it is destined to play as prominent a role as any of the engines of destruction.

And with the time not far distant, according to many engineers, when Bellini and Tosi will perfect their device for independent communication — too complicatedly simple for the layman to understand — and when Hans Knudsen will succeed in working linotype machines by wireless waves, not to speak of flashing perfect photographs through the infinite ether, what seems the fairy tale of to-day will be the familiar proceeding of tomorrow.

This ends our selections on Radios’ First Triumph by three of the most important authorities on this topic:

• an article in Current Literature by Edward J. Wheeler.
• his address to the Royal Institution of Great Britain by Gugllelmo Marconi.
• an article in Putnam’s Magazine by Arthur D. H. Smith.

Edward J. Wheeler begins here. Gugllelmo Marconi begins here. Arthur D. H. Smith begins here.

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