The Motor Rangers' Wireless Station
Knitting his forehead in thought, Joe went painstakingly over themessage. It contained words he recollected having heard the intrudingoperator use. Then he took a pencil and with the help of the key managedto turn the meaningless message into plain English. This is what hewrote down:
“Leave _Vesta_ before arrival at Vancouver. San Diego police have wiredto arrest you there.”
“Phew!” whistled Joe, “so that was the game, eh? No wonder those fellowsdidn’t want to send their despatch from a land office! They were warninga friend, apparently a confederate of theirs in crime. Well, therascals! I’ll fix it so that their warning will fall flat.”
He began sending out calls broadcast for the _Vesta_. It was some timebefore he raised her a hundred miles or more to the north of GoatIsland. When he finally got in connection with the steamer, he requestedthe operator to transmit a private and confidential message to thecaptain. Then he sent word that the man to whom the two confederates hadwirelessed was in all probability a criminal, and that it would be wiseto keep him under surveillance and hand him over to the police at thefirst opportunity. When he had done this and received warm thanks forit, Joe began to try to raise the authorities ashore. He succeeded ingetting a message into Santa Barbara police headquarters, which repliedthat they would be on the lookout for the two men who had visited theisland. The information concerning the passenger on the _Vesta_ wastransmitted by the local authorities up the coast as far as Vancouver.
“Well, that’s a good job done,” sighed the lad contentedly, as he shovedhis chair back and grounded his instruments. “Now then, if only they cannail those two fellows ashore, the wireless on Goat Island will havejustified its existence for this day at any rate.”
All this time Hank Harley, a tall, raw-boned youth with big awkwardhands and feet, had been looking on at Joe’s activities with much thesame expression as a small boy gazing at a magician. It was plain thatto Hank the whole thing savored of mystery. He stared at Joe with suchwonderment and admiration that the boy could not help smiling.
“Were you talking to some one with that thing?” he asked incredulously.
“I certainly was. I was giving some information to a ship more than ahundred miles off.”
“Sho! Go on, now. Was you, honest?”
“Just as true as I’m sitting here,” replied Joe, but he saw that Hank’sface bore an expression of disbelief, and doubted if he would be able toexplain to the unsophisticated youth the rather intricate theory of thewireless. He contented himself, therefore, by replying:
“I felt just the same way as you do about it, Hank, till I found out formyself just what wonderful things the wireless could accomplish.”
Hank, with a look of keen curiosity on his rough features stepped closeto the instruments. He cautiously stretched out his gnarled fingers andtouched the detector. The next instant he gave a howl of pain andbounded up till his head almost touched the roof of the shanty.
“Wow! Ow! Ouch!” he yelled at the top of his voice.
“What on earth is the matter?” demanded Joe, who had not seen Hank’smovement.
“Ouch! She bit!”
“She? Who?”
“Them things thar,” and Hank pointed to the instruments.
Joe couldn’t help laughing at Hank’s woebegone and alarmed expression asthe young fisherman rubbed his arm.
“That wasn’t a bite, Hank, that was an electric shock. I wouldn’t adviseyou to tamper with the instruments again. Come here and I’ll show youhow to work the key.”
“What, me? No, siree bob,” and Hank shook his head with deep conviction.“Let sleeping dawgs lie, says I. I wouldn’t touch that thar thing ag’infer a new fishing boat. Wow, but the sparks flew!”
“It was lucky for you that we are not operating a high power station,”declared Joe. “Had we been doing so you might have been knocked out.”
“Sho! Killed dead?”
“Maybe. At the big stations the electric forces in the atmosphere are sostrong that visitors cannot bring their watches into the operating room,unless they want to run the risk of seriously disarranging themechanism.”
Hank looked prepared to believe anything by this time.
“Say, Joe,” he said, “now that we’ve buried the hatchet, s’pose you tellme something about how this contraption works.”
“It’s rather hard to explain in simple language, Hank, and I guess thereare heaps of fellows just like you who’d like to understand the firstprinciples of wireless without tackling a lot of dry text books, so heregoes.”
“Let her go,” said Hank, knitting his brows and preparing to assimilateknowledge with a determined look on his rugged features.
“Of course you know about the waves of the sea,” began Joe. “Well, theair, or more properly the ether, is full of just such waves. But theyare not set in motion till a disturbing element answering to a storm ora wind at sea is set loose among them. For instance, when I depress thiskey, I set loose an electric shock that agitates the ether and sends outwaves. These waves may be long or short as I desire, according to thepower of the shock sent out.
“In 1888 a Professor Hertz began the first attempts to utilize thesewaves to send messages through the air. In a crude way he succeeded, andpaved the way for his followers along these lines. Hertz found that heatand light are all electric waves. The waves that he set in motion fromhis apparatus bear his name, Hertzian waves.”
“Then all the air is full of waves?” asked Hank, looking about him in arather scared sort of way, as if he rather expected to be engulfed insome atmospheric disturbance at any time and was preparing to swim forhis life.
“That’s it, Hank, you’re catching on fine. But understand, the wavesrequire some force to agitate them. It’s like a mill pond, the air is,quite smooth till you chuck a stone into it, and then waves beginspreading out in all directions.”
Hank nodded as if he quite understood this homely illustration.
“Heave ahead,” he said, settling back in his seat.
“All right,” smiled Joe. “Now you see my detector here,—quite anelaborate bit of mechanism, isn’t it?”
“Yep, that’s what bit me,” muttered Hank, rubbing his arm once more atthe recollection.
“Well, Hertz had to make his detector just out of a circle of wire witha gap in it. A screw adjustment lengthened or shortened the distancebetween the ends of the wire, making the gap larger or smaller. Thewaves, as they came in, were registered on this detector in the form ofminute sparks. Is this all clear to you?”
“Oh, as clear as mud,” was the non-committal reply, with a wave of thehand.
“In 1895, Sir Oliver Lodge detected waves from an oscillator over adistance of forty yards, using a filings tube coherer, a galvanometerand a cell.”
“Hey, hey, hard aport there!” cried Hank. “You’re out of soundings,mate.”
“Well, that is a little technical, I’ll admit,” smiled Joe. “I’ll tryand get down to plainer language.”
“Yep, my head ain’t tough enough to take in all that. It’s swimming nowas if you’d chucked a dictionary at it,” growled Hank. “Tell me thenames of them biting jiggers on the table thar, and what they’resupposed to do.”
“Very well. This,” touching it, “is the coil or transformer. Thatproduces the spark that slips up into the aerials, those wires over ourheads, and sends it shooting off into space just like that stone youmight chuck in the pond.”
“Um-hum, that’s all clear enough. Heave ahead.”
“Now you see this little appliance? That is the vibrator. By that I canregulate the length and ‘fatness’ of my spark. Now when I press down thekey like this——”
S-s-scrack!
Hank almost jumped from his seat as the green spark whined and leapedbetween the terminals.
“——well, that is a dot. If I make the contact longer, it forms a dash.Of course you know the Morse alphabet is made up of dots and dashes. Forinstance the letter A is .—.”
To illustr
ate Joe made the dot-dash sign, at which Hank blinked hiseyes, but resolutely suppressed other symptoms of nervousness.
“And so on through the alphabet. Each letter has its own combination ofdots and dashes. The only instruments needed in a simple set are thecoil, spark-gap, wireless key and batteries; that is, for a sending set.Now we come to the receiving part of it.
“Suppose another operator miles away has been sending out into space thedot-dash just as I have been doing. If I had my receivers on, that is,those telephone-like things that I put on my head and over my ears, whythen I’d have heard it, providing my apparatus was tuned to his wavelengths.”
“Hold hard! Hold hard! I don’t quite get that.”
“Simple enough. As I told you, various shocks of current produce variouswave lengths. Well, suppose my receiving apparatus is only adjusted toreceive a wave length of one thousand feet, and he is sending a wave ofone thousand two hundred feet, then my apparatus will not be ‘in tune’with his. That is, I shouldn’t be able to hear him.”
“Wa’al, how d’ye fix that—by touching off them biting things?” askedHank. “Look a’out!” he added, as he saw Joe’s hand move toward thereceiving tuning coil, “you ought’er have them things muzzled. If theybit you in the dog-days you’d git hydrophoby, sure as cock-fightin’.”
“Now then, Hank, a receiving tuning coil is used to adjust the wavelengths of the receiving circuits. This tuning, as it is called, is verysimple. See, I move these sliding contacts along a bar, at the same timelistening in. As soon as I am ‘in tune,’ I hear the dots and dashes fromthe other chap begin beating into my ears. Easy, isn’t it?”
“Humph, ’bout as easy as walkin’ a tight rope or running an air-ship!Joe, I couldn’t larn nothun’ ’bout such didoes in a billion, trillion ofyears.”
“In order to get the waves from the aerials into the receivers at myears, they have to filter through the detector——”
“That’s the thing that bit me, that d’tector.”
“——through the detector, which consists of two mineral points in verydelicate contact.”
“But is the blamed thing of any real use?” Hank wanted to be informed.
CHAPTER XX.
HANK EXPLAINS.
Joe laughed at Hank’s last question.
“Of use? Why, man alive, since wireless has been introduced, it hasaverted some great sea disasters and been the means of saving thousandsof lives, not to mention its commercial value.”
“Do tell! It’s saved a lot of ships, hey?”
Hank looked really interested now.
“It certainly has. Some time ago the _Prinz Joachim_, of the Atlas Line,from New York to the West Indies, grounded on a remote island of theBahama group more than a thousand miles south of New York. In the olddays she’d have stuck there, while the passengers took to the boats orplayed Robinson Crusoe on the island. But nowadays what happened? Why,Henry Muller, her wireless man, was sent for by the captain, and he atonce began pumping out the call for the home office of the line in aBroadway skyscraper.
“Almost by the time the last of the passengers, aroused by the shock,had come on deck to learn the cause of it, the captain was able toassure them that New York had the news and that the home office hadflung out a call for rescue ships along the whole length of the AtlanticCoast. At the same time, of course, the vessel’s own wireless was on thejob, too.
“Well, several ships were quickly located in the vicinity, and beforelong a small fleet was rushing to the _Joachim’s_ aid. There was no fearon board. In fact, William Jennings Bryan, who was a passenger, couldnot resist the opportunity to make a speech. He suggested that they forma republic on the island, and that, as he could not be elected presidentof the United States, they make him chief executive of the island realm.
“Then take the case of the steamer _Momus_, carrying one hundred andtwelve passengers, that caught fire off Cape Hatteras. Every effort wasmade to fight the blaze, which started among cotton bales in the forwardhold; but to no avail. In this emergency, wireless signals were flashedin all directions.
“Before long they were answered. The _Comus_, a sister ship, heard themand informed the _Momus_ that she was seventy-eight miles away and wouldcome at top speed to the rescue. The two ships, by constantinterchanging of their positions through the night, came together at twoo’clock in the morning. Naturally, every passenger was up and about, buton the other hand there was no panic. The fact that wireless was onboard gave a feeling of security to all, which they certainly would nothave had otherwise.
“All the passengers were taken off in safety, and the relief ship stoodby till the _Momus_ was beached in shallow water and the fires drownedout. Twelve hours afterward the water was pumped out. The passengersre-embarked and the ship resumed her voyage. Incidentally, the ship andher cargo, valued at three million dollars, were saved. Not the leastremarkable feature of this rescue was that throughout the whole affairthe general manager of the line at his desk in New York was kept inconstant touch with the situation and directed the operations.
“But I’m preaching a regular sermon,” broke off Joe.
“No, no; heave on, Joe. I like to hear about it,” declared Hank, who, totell the truth, was anxious to stave off the inevitable time ofexplanation of his presence on the island, which he felt was close athand.
“To switch to the naval uses of the wireless, then. The torpedo boat_Beale_ was overtaken by a heavy storm off the Virginia capes. The waveswere mountain high and it soon became clear that unless assistance came,and that speedily, the long, lean craft would be unable to ride out thegale. The _S. O. S._ signal, which means ‘in dire distress,’ was sentout, and was read by the wireless station at Norfolk. It was quicklypassed on to Washington and received by the assistant secretary of thenavy, who at once got into communication with the _Beale_. He asked forfurther details so that he could despatch relief intelligently. The_Beale_ responded, and all this within a few minutes, that she was awashand making bad weather of it. This reply was in the secretary’s hands intime to enable him to send relief ships out from Norfolk, and the_Beale_ and her crew were saved.
“There is one other field in which the wireless plays an important part.That is in the capture of criminals. A runaway now stands a much greaterchance of being caught at sea than he does ashore. In former years theexact reverse was true. A man who tries to flee from America to Europeto avoid the consequences of a crime is, so to speak, like a runnercaught between bases. The wireless spreads a net about him from which hecannot escape.
“One notable case occurred in 1911. A crime had been committed inLondon, and the search for the man who did it was carried on by animmense corps of police and detectives all over Europe working inharmony. London, Paris, Berlin were all searched, but without results.The runaway had vanished utterly.
“While the search was at its height and hope of capturing the man hadbeen about given up, a wireless call was picked up one night at astation on the Irish coast from the captain of a trans-Atlantic steamerin mid-ocean. It asked for a detailed description of the man who waswanted. It was sent, and the captain of the vessel replied that hebelieved that he had the man, for whom a fine-tooth comb search had beenconducted, on board his ship.
“Excitement ran high. People on both sides of the Atlantic awaited moredetails, but the ship got out of range for a time and was not heard fromtill the station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, picked up a message fromthe captain to say that he was sure he had the criminal wanted on board.He asked that detectives be ready when the ship came into quarantine onthe St. Lawrence River, for she was bound for Quebec.
“The criminal was trapped like a wild beast. While the ship was stillthree days from port, the police began to gather. Newspapers from allover the country rushed men to the place where it had been arranged bywireless to board her. And all this time, the man wanted had no ideathat the net was being drawn about him. It was not till he was actuallyunder arre
st that he learned what wireless had done toward his capture.And this is only one of a number of such cases.”
“Do tell,” exclaimed Hank amazedly; “that thing is a sort of a conjurer,be’ant it?”
“It is all of that,” smiled Joe; “but now tell me, Hank,” he said, “howdid you happen to come here in the nick of time to let me out? Whatbrought you here, anyhow?”
Hank looked grave. A troubled expression came over his sunburned face.
“I allowed I’d just sail out here and straighten matters out,” hestammered.
“What matters?”
“Why, that thing about soaking your chum on the head and carrying himoff to the cave. I had no part in it. Honest Injun, I didn’t, and I wastoo scared of old Israel and the rest to do anything.”
“Humph,” remarked Joe, “but you didn’t try to help him at all.”
“I was going to after we got back from taking Minory out of the cave,but when we did he had gone. Got clear away in that little old boat. Itwas all old Israel’s fault. He’d do anything for money, Iz would. Whenthe Minory chap flashed a big roll on him, it was all off. It’s luckythings didn’t turn out worse.”
“Where are your uncle and the others now?” demanded Joe.
“Honest, I don’t know,” rejoined Hank, looking Joe straight in the eyes.“They haven’t shown up at Martinez. I reckon they are scared and arewaiting till things blow over a bit before they show their heads.”
“That sounds plausible,” answered Joe. “Are you through with them?” headded.
“Yes, sir,” was the emphatic reply. “I want to live straight. I neverhad much use for old Israel, but this last bit of business sickened me.I came out here to see you fellows to tell you that I was your friend,and that if I hear anything about that bunch I’ll tell you.”