CHAPTER VII
A Government Operator at Arlington
NEARLY every one has the idea, or mania, or whatever you call it, of making some kind of a collection. It often begins to show itself early in a fellow’s life, and I’ve seen some old codgers in which it was still going strong at seventy.
For instance, when I was only 10 or 12 years old I began to collect postage stamps; mother started to collect trading stamps as soon as they were invented; dad has a wonderful collection of old carbureters, which ill-fated motorists had thrown away, and Messrs. Carnegie and Rockefeller are still collecting the coin of the realm.
The pet collections of the ladies of my home town consisted chiefly of souvenir spoons, china, pewter-ware and cut-glass while the men collected autographs and books, bugs and butterflies, antiques and paintings, fishing tackle and sporting guns. Then there was a sad-eyed young man whose parents were poor, but dishonest, who got a notion he would make a collection of all the solid silver water pitchers in and adjacent to Montclair, but the police made him to part with his novel collection and for the next five years he had ample time to collect his scattered wits.
A few years after I had been with Mr. Marconi at St. Johns, when he received the first signals flashed across the Atlantic, his and other companies and various governments began to put up and to operate gigantic cableless stations. It came to me that it would be a nice thing to make a collection of all these big wireless plants. In thinking it over, though, I had to admit there were a couple of obstacles in the way which would make it a mighty hard proposition to carry through—and these were: (1) I couldn’t get them all in our back-yard in Montclair, and (2) I didn’t have the ready money to buy them.
The next best plan, I pictured in my mind’s eye, would be to make a two foot scale model of each one of them and arrange them in a double row like the mummies in the Metropoli-tan Art Museum. As this scheme too, I figured, would take much time and money I compromised the matter by promising myself that I would visit each station in turn as they were put up and then in the end, I’d have a mental collection of them and this, at least, wouldn’t take up any room nor would it cost very much.
After Marconi had received messages up to 1,551 miles and signals up to 2,099 miles at sea on a Morse register from his experimental station at Poldhu the future of cableless telegraphy was an assured fact.
In 1902 stations of much greater power were put up at Poldhu, England, and at Glace Bay on the Newfoundland Coast and at Wellfleet, Mass. When the latter station was far enough along so that messages could be sent, Colonel Roosevelt, who was then President of the United States was asked to send King Edward VII the first cableless message across the Atlantic. It read:
“His Majesty Edward VII, London, England. In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greet-ings and good wishes to you and all the people of the British Empire. Theodore Roosevelt, Wellfieet, Mass.”
As the new station at Poldhu was not in shape to send back the reply of King Edward it had to be transmitted by cable and it read:
“The President, White House, Washington, America. I thank you most sincerely for the kind message which I have just received from you by transatlantic wireless telegraphy. I sincerely reciprocate in the name of the people of the British Empire the cordial greetings and friendly sentiments expressed by you on behalf of the American nation and I heartily wish you and your country every possible prosperity. Edward R. and I., Sandringham.”
That cableless telegraphy might be done on a commercial basis to the best advantage the Marconi Company decided to put up two new and more powerful stations, one at Clifden on the coast of Ireland an a a new one at Glace Bay on this side of the Atlantic. When these stations were finished the regular transmission of both private and public messages across the Atlantic began in competition with the cable lines. The exchange of cableless messages was kept up for ten months when the station at Glace Bay burned down. Work on another station was started at once, however, and new apparatus was built for it.
Again communication was set up between Glace Bay and Clifden, the first messages being sent and received by the Postmasters General of England and Canada.
Now while it was very hard for any one to get a pass to go inside the cableless stations, even the directors of the Marconi Company having been denied that privilege, I went up to St. Johns the next summer for a week’s vacation and, incidentally, to see the station at Glace Bay. I felt pretty sure I should succeed for I knew one of the operators there.
The station is about three miles from the village of Glace Bay, on the island of Cape Breton; it belongs to Nova Scotia but is separated from it by the Strait of Canso. I didn’t have to ask where the station was for four enormously high towers stood out before me like great sentinels, imposing and mysterious and they can be seen for miles around. [could also make out a dozen very high masts.
The entire station is built on rising ground nearly a hundred feet above the level of the sea and below it lay the waters of big Glace Bay. Three low buildings—at least they looked very low to me as I gaged them with the height of the towers around them—are used for housing the apparatus.
After being halted several times by watchmen picketed on the grounds I finally got to the office and told the man in charge I wanted to see one of the operators, Howard Brice, who, you will remember, was one of my boon wireless chums of Montclair days.
We hadn’t seen each other since he and I became professional operators and we had a regular old sea-captain’s time of it recounting our experiences.
“Want to see the station, Jack?” he asked.
“Don’t mind if I do,” I replied in a don’t-give-a-care way.
The building we were in not only contained the office but a sound proof room in which the receiving sets were placed. When we crossed the threshold I was standing in a room where even the directors of the company could not tread, not because they were, like angels, afraid, but the men higher up were afraid to let them, for Marconi had a lot of would-be rivals in those days especially on this side of the Atlantic.
The receivers were of the usual ship type, with magnetic detectors and head-phones, and these were connected to the leading-in wire of the aerial through switches and passed outside through insulators in the wall. Several other wires connected to ordinary telegraph instruments also passed through the wall.
“You see, Jack,” my guide said, “these lines belong to the Western Union and the Canadian Pacific Railway Telegraph Company and by means of them the transatlantic cableless messages are received for transmission: to England or are forwarded to their destination on the Continent.”
This was all interesting enough but there wasn’t much to see. We went over to another building which contained the power plant. In here a big steam engine was running an alternating current generator.
“This generator develops 820 kilowatts, or about 1,100 horse-power, and,” he continued, “this is the most powerful generator ever built for a wireless transmitter.”
Again interesting but as far as I could see they looked just like any other power plant. I sized them up just the same to see what I could see.
“Now, let’s take a peep at the sending apparatus,” and with that we strolled over to the third building.
“Sounds like a young thunder factory!” I ejaculated as crashes of electric fire tore through the air like small bolts of lightning.
“If we’d had this station down there in Montclair we’d have had them all by the ears, eh, Jack?”
“I’d say we would,” I returned as I measured with my eye the gigantic high potential apparatus.
This was made up of low frequency transformers, revolving spark-gaps which changed the high pressure alternating currents into high frequency electricity. Then there were the high pressure oscillation transformers, the condensers and switches of large size which were actuated by telegraph sending keys. Yes, indeed, here were the real sights of a cableless station and it was fully worth all that my round voyage cost me to see it. Having feasted my eyes on this greatest of twentieth century wonders to my heart’s content we went outside to get a close-up of the aerials.
“You see, Jack, we have two separate and distinct aerial wire systems. The first, which is strung up between the four great towers is used only for sending and the second which is suspended from the sticks is used only for receiving. These latticed towers are built of wood and each one is 410 feet high and together they form a square each side of which is 220 feet across.
“The sending aerial is formed of a large number of nearly parallel wires all of them spread out at the top and coming together at the bottom like an inverted pyramid. This aerial which has 60,000 feet of wire in it was suspended from the tops of the towers. A leading-in wire is secured to the ends of all the aerial wires where they come together at the bottom. It leads, as you see,” he pointed to the side of the building, “into the room through insulators where it is connected to the rotary spark-gap through a closed circuit.
“These masts, or sticks, which are arranged in three rows, hold up the receiving aerials. There are 18,000.feet of wire in it and it is made in the shape of a fan with the handle pointing in the direction of Clifden where our other station is located.”
Before leaving Howard told me that when he heard the Marconi Company intended to build a pair of cableless stations it was his great ambition to be one of the operators and in getting this position he had realized it. For myself I preferred to go on making my collection of cableless stations rather than to be planted up there at Glace Bay even though this was one of the three places in the world where the overland telegraph lines and transatlantic cableless meet and form a clearing house for the news of two continents.
It was my intention to sail for Belfast, Ireland—all the big steamers touch at that port on their way from New York to Liverpool—and go over to Clifden to see the cableless station there. Before leaving, however, I got it straight from Mr. Bottomley, who was the President of the American Marconi Company, that it was built from the same plans as the one at Glace Bay and that the apparatus was exactly the same. I concluded not to bother add-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.
You know the Eiffel Tower was built in the midst of the ornamental park of the Champ de Mars as the biggest attraction of the Paris Exposition in 1885. When it was built wireless was an unknown means of communication and when the Exposition was over there was much talk about wrecking it, for it was not only useless but the Parisians thought it a hideous object to be stuck up in a park.
But when Marconi showed the world how to send messages across the ocean, and since one of the chief factors for long distance wireless transmission was a high aerial, it didn’t take half-an-eye for the French War Department to see that the Eiffel Tower, which was very nearly a thousand feet high, was just the thing to support an aerial.
Captain Ferrié, who had given much time to developing wireless apparatus for the Army, was put in charge of installing a small plant of about 15 horse-power simply to see what could be done with it. This experimental plant at once proved very useful in sending out time signals and weather reports to ships at sea and for the Navy Department to issue orders to Naval Commanders, but its greatest value was shown during the Moroccan troubles when the War Department was able to keep in direct touch with the Army there through its station at Casablanca.
The need of a new, permanent, high-powered station was strongly felt and work was commenced on it in 1908. Now instead of a couple of makeshift shacks at the base of the tower a concrete building was put in under the ground so that its roof was on a level with the surface of the park. This was done in order that a clear view across the grounds could be had and also to prevent the noise of the sparks from being heard in the neighborhood, which would not only be disturbing, but, what mattered more, any one who knew the Morse code could read all the outgoing messages a block away.
When I got settled in Paris I struck out to see the Eiffel Tower station. I found it was just about to be opened and it was my intention to try to get a job there for I believed it would be the only way I’d ever get to see the installation.
I asked a gendarme, as they call an armed policeman over there, who was standing hard by, where the office of the wireless station might happen to be—that is, I asked him in the deaf and dumb alphabet, and I gathered from the motions he made with his hands and arms that it was in the underground building. I hied me down the stairs and found myself in a small, central area-way from which doors around it opened into the office, receiving, dynamo and sending rooms.
Not being able to read French, as I explained to some officials afterward, I had carelessly opened the door on which the sign read Bureau de Transmitteur instead of Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil with the result that I saw the whole blooming sending apparatus. There were two operators in charge but they didn’t think I was worth noticing.
The sending apparatus was very much the same as that I saw in the cableless station at Glace Bay. This is easily explained because there is only one way to change a large amount of low pressure electricity such as is generated by an alternating current dynamo into high potential, high frequency electricity and that way is to use a transformer to step up the pressure of the alternating current; condensers are then charged with the latter current and this in turn is discharged between a pair of spark balls, or a rotary spark-gap which is used for the same purpose.
Not having been thrown out of the sending room and having seen all there was. to see I opened the door to the Bureau de Recepteur and took a good look at the receiving apparatus. The detectors were of the electrolytic type, each of the cups which contained the solution having three wires sealed in it instead of one; this was the invention of Prof. Branly of Paris who got up the coherer several years before Marconi began his experiments in wireless.
The door of the Installation d’ Alimentation Electrique was open and I glanced in at the dynamos, motors and storage batteries and from the size of its equipment I judged the station to be about 100 horsepower. Having seen it all I opened the door of the Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil and walked in just as we do in offices over here.
Somebody must have told the Directeur, or manager as we would call him in good old English, that I was coming for before I could explain in sign language that I wanted a job he, with the aid of a couple of other conspirators, hustled me unceremoniously out, up the stairs and on to the green grass of the park. No, it wasn’t exactly a case of sour grapes but after I had seen the apparatus of the station and added it to my Christian Science collection I didn’t want the job anyway.
The most interesting feature of the Eiffel Tower wireless station is its aerial and before I left I studied it carefully. It is a one-sided affair, but this is not because its designer thought well of it but in virtue of the fact that the Eiffel Tower sets at one end of the Champ de Mars.
If the tower had been built in the middle of the park the wires could have been brought down all around it on all sides thus forming what is called an umbrella aerial and this would have been good practise, as the engineers say. As it is there are six steel cables about ½ an inch in diameter secured to but insulated from the top of the tower on one side and these are guyed out in the shape of a fan and anchored at the other end of the park.
The cables are set in stone posts which project above the ground and to prevent simple folks from laying their hands on them, in which case their bodies would become conductors and allow a few million volts of high potential electricity to pass through them, the posts are surrounded by iron fences. The main cables are connected together about half-way between the ground and the top of the tower with other and lighter cables and these are joined to a single leading-in cable which runs down to and passes through a window to the top of the area- way in the underground building.
Finally the leading-in cable is connected to one end of a tuning coil, the other end of which is joined to a ground formed of metal plates having nearly 3000 square feet of surface and these are buried deeply in the earth far below the underground building.
Before I left the States to get the Eiffel Tower station the Navy Department had contracted with the National Signaling Company, an American wireless telegraph concern, for the most powerful cableless plant that had yet been built.
While I was in France work had been started on the towers and buildings at Arlington on the Potomac River near Washington and the machinery and apparatus for it was being built. After my return, with some jockeying, I landed a position with the National Signaling Company in the testing department and so had the opportunity of watching the whole installation grow up of which I shall tell you presently.
Finally when every piece of apparatus had been built and given exhaustive tests the equipment was shipped to Arlington, or, as some would-be high-brow tried to rename it, Radio, and the engineers and working force of the Company were sent to Arlington to install it, get it into working order and make the final tests required by the Government before the latter took it over.
When we reached Washington I could see the three great steel towers at Arlington looming up as high, it seemed to me, as the Washington Monument itself. On reaching the Arlington station which sets on the crest of a hill in a corner of the Fort Myer Reservation, the towers did not look so high, nor were they, for the tallest one was about 600 feet and the two shorter ones were 400 feet high. These three towers formed a triangle, the distance between the two shorter ones being 350 feet, and 450 feet between the taller and shorter ones. These towers, which were complete and ready for the aerials, rested on concrete bases and were insulated from the ground by slabs of marble. There are three buildings and these were also ready for the installation.
Now while the machinery and apparatus were being moved into the buildings and set in place a force of men was put to work on assembling the aerials and swinging them between the tops of the towers. These aerials are known as T, or flat-top aerials and right here I want to tell you how and why this type of aerial came to be.
In the early days Marconi, and those who followed him, thought that a high vertical wire, that is, one sticking straight up in the air, was all that was needed to get distance. On ships the masts are never very high and so the late Lieutenant Hudgens of the U. S. Navy tried stringing the wires of the aerial down to the bow and stern of the battleship Kearsarge to give the wires a greater length. This sloping aerial gave so much better results than the straight, or vertical aerial that he then suspended the wires between the top of the masts of the ship and, lo-and-behold, it worked even better than before and thus it was that the T, or flat-top aerial came to be.
To get the best results the aerials of two stations communicating with each other should both be vertical or flat-top, that is, a vertical wire will not receive from a flat-top nearly as well as from another one that is vertical and this is just as true the other way about. As all ships are fitted with flat-top aerials and as the Eiffel Tower aerial is neither the one kind nor the other but a sloping aerial and hence would receive from a flat-top as well as from a vertical aerial the Navy Department decided to use the T or flat-top aerial on the Arlington station.
We assembled, tested and put up the three flat-top aerials between the towers and connected them together so that in effect a single long aerial was formed. Porcelain insulators of the kind on which high tension power transmission lines are carried are used to insulate the aerials from the towers. The leading-in cable runs from the aerials to which it is connected down to the operating room through a copper tube set in a glass window.
The ground is formed of copper wires buried deeply in the earth and radiating in every direction from the station. This network of wires extends over, I should say, ten acres, and this, of course, makes a very good ground.
The current for energizing the sending apparatus is taken from the lines of the Potomac Light and Power Company; this runs an electric motor of 200 horse power which in turn drives a 100 kilowatt alternating current generator; the current from the latter flows through a transformer which raises the pressure of it to 25,000 volts. Next a battery of compressed air condensers are charged with this high voltage current and this is discharged by a rotating spark-gap. This spark-gap has a wheel, on the rim of which is set a number of metal points, or electrodes as they are called, and around them are an equal number of fixed metal points or electrodes.
When the wheel revolves sparks are made only when the electrodes on the wheel and those that are fixed around it are exactly in a line. Now instead of a few big sparks taking place every second, a thousand smaller ones occur in a second and this makes a whistling sound which is heard by the operator who is listening-in at the distant station. The high frequency currents set up by the spark-gap then surge through an oscillation transformer which increases its pressure and finally into and through the aerial wire system where they are damped out in long electric waves.
The Morse telegraph key is placed in the receiving room and it works a control switch in the sending room. The control switch breaks up the current that flows from the generator into the transformer into dots and dashes.
The receiving instruments have both electrolytic and crystal detectors, the other parts being made up of the usual variable condensers, tuning coils and oscillation transformer and head-phones.
Well, at last everything was all ready for the final company test and I was mighty glad of it for things were getting very much on my nerves. A cableless station is altogether too big and cold-blooded a proposition for a fellow who likes a little excitement once in a while.
The Navy Department had fitted out the cruiser Salem with a sending and a receiving apparatus exactly like that of the Arlington station except it was very much smaller.
n February 13, 1913, the Salem sailed from the League Island Navy Yard at the mouth of the Delaware River for the Mediterranean Sea so that the official tests of the Arlington station could be made. The letter D was used for the test signals and we sent these out from Arlington for 15 minutes each time before the messages were transmitted.
Officials from the Navy Department gave us the messages to send and we were allowed under the terms of the contract to repeat each message three times to make sure the Salem got it, but no more. The Salem then followed by sending the test signal D and after this she sent four messages which the Captain gave her operators. This exchange of signals and messages was made twice a day throughout the Salem’s voyage across.
The messages we sent from Arlington were received by the Salem up to a distance of 2,375 miles, while the messages sent by the operators on the Salem were received by Arlington up to a distance of 1,000 miles. Far greater distances were covered by both the shore and ship stations but they were not accurate enough to meet the conditions called for by the Navy Department.
At night when the ether is quiet, as is always the case, the messages from both stations were sent and received over greater distances than by day and we were able to read what the Salem sent when she was out 1,600 miles and her operators got us up to 3,200 miles. Even when the Salem reached Gibraltar she could get Arlington’s signals but they were so feeble she could not take down our messages.
The National Signaling Company having successfully completed the tests imposed by its contract with the Government now formally turned Arlington station over to the Navy Department and having added that great station to my collection I was ready to get back to the big town.