Chapter 2

On Signal Hill, at St. Johns, Newfoundland--a bold bluff overlooking the sea--a group of men worked for several days, first in the little stone house at the brink of the bluff, setting up some electric apparatus; and later, on the flat ground nearby, the same men were very busy flying a great kite and raising a balloon. There was no doubt about the earnestness of these men: they were not raising that kite for fun. They worked with care and yet with an eagerness that no boy ever displays when setting his home-made or store flyer to the breeze. They had hard luck: time and time again the wind or the rain, or else the fog, baffled them, but a quiet young fellow with a determined, thoughtful face urged them on, tugged at the cord, or held the kite while the others ran with the line. Whether Marconi stood to one side and directed or took hold with his men, there was no doubt who was master. At last the kite was flying gallantly, high overhead in the blue. From the sagging kite-string hung a wire that ran into the low stone house.

One cold December day in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi sat still in a room in the Government building at Signal Hill, St. Johns, Newfoundland, with a telephone receiver at his ear and his eye on the clock that ticked loudly nearby. Overhead flew his kite bearing his receiving-wire. It was 12:30 o'clock on the American side of the ocean, and Marconi had ordered his operator in far-off Poldhu, two thousand watery miles away, to begin signalling the letter "S"--three dots of the Morse code, three flashes of the bluish sparks--at that corresponding hour. For six years he had been looking forward to and working for that moment--the final test of all his effort and the beginning of a new triumph. He sat waiting to hear three small sounds, the br-br-br of the Morse code "S," humming on the diaphragm of his receiver--the signature of the ether waves that had travelled two thousand miles to his listening ear. As the hands of the clock, whose ticking alone broke the stillness of the room, reached thirty minutes past twelve, the receiver at the inventor's ear began to hum, br-br-br, as distinctly as the sharp rap of a pencil on a table--the unmistakable note of the ether vibrations sounded in the telephone receiver. The telephone receiver was used instead of the usual recorder on account of its superior sensitiveness.

Transatlantic wireless telegraphy was an accomplished fact.

Though many doubted that an actual signal had been sent across the Atlantic, the scientists of both continents, almost without exception, accepted Marconi's statement. The sending of the transatlantic signal, the spanning of the wide ocean with translatable vibrations, was a great achievement, but the young Italian bore his honours modestly, and immediately went to work to perfect his system.

Two months after receiving the message from Poldhu at St. Johns, Marconi set sail from England for America, in the _Philadelphia_, to carry out, on a much larger scale, the experiments he had worked out with the tug three years ago. The steamship was fitted with a complete receiving and sending outfit, and soon after she steamed out from the harbor she began to talk to the Cornwall station in the dot-and-dash sign language. The long-distance talk between ship and shore continued at intervals, the recording instrument writing the messages down so that any one who understood the Morse code could read. Message after message came and went until one hundred and fifty miles of sea lay between Marconi and his station. Then the ship could talk no more, her sending apparatus not being strong enough; but the faithful men at Poldhu kept sending messages to their chief, and the recorder on the _Philadelphia_ kept taking them down in the telegrapher's shorthand, though the steamship was plowing westward at twenty miles an hour. Day after day, at the appointed hour to the very second, the messages came from the station on land, flung into the air with the speed of light, to the young man in the deck cabin of a speeding steamship two hundred and fifty, five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred, yes, two thousand and ninety-nine miles away--messages that were written down automatically as they came, being permanent records that none might gainsay and that all might observe.

To Marconi it was the simple carrying out of his orders, for he said that he had fitted the Poldhu instruments to work to two thousand one hundred miles, but to those who saw the thing done--saw the narrow strips of paper come reeling off the recorder, stamped with the blue impressions of the messages through the air, it was astounding almost beyond belief; but there was the record, duly attested by those who knew, and clearly marked with the position of the ship in longitude and latitude at the time they were received.

It was only a few months afterward that Marconi, from his first station in the United States, at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., sent a message direct to Poldhu, three thousand miles. At frequent intervals messages go from one country to the other across the ocean, carried through fog, unaffected by the winds, and following the curvature of the earth, without the aid of wires.

Again the unassuming nature of the young Italian was shown. There was no brass band nor display of national colours in honour of the great achievement; it was all accomplished quietly, and suddenly the world woke up to find that the thing had been done. Then the great personages on both sides of the water congratulated and complimented each other by Marconi's wireless system.

At Marconi's new station at Glacé Bay, Cape Breton, and at the powerful station at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, the receiving and sending wires are supported by four great towers more than two hundred feet high. Many wires are used instead of one, and much greater power is of course employed than at first, but the marvellously simple principle is the same that was used in the garden at Bologna. The coherer has been displaced by a new device invented by Marconi, called a magnetic detector, by which the ether waves are aided by a stronger current to record the message. The effect is the same, but the method is entirely different.

The sending of a long-distance message is a spectacular thing. Current of great power is used, and the spark is a blinding flash accompanied by deafening noises that suggest a volley from rifles. But Marconi is experimenting to reduce the noise, and the use of the mercury vapour invented by Peter Cooper Hewitt will do much to increase the rapidity in sending.

After much experimenting Marconi discovered that the longer the waves in the ether the more penetrating and lasting the quality they possessed, just as long swells on a body of water carry farther and endure longer than short ones. Moreover, he discovered that if many sending-wires were used instead of one, and strong electric power was employed instead of weak, these long, penetrating, enduring waves could be produced. All the new Marconi stations, therefore, built for long-distance work, are fitted with many sending-wires, and powerful dynamos are run which are capable of producing a spark between the silvered knobs as thick as a man's wrist.

Marconi and several other workers in the field of wireless telegraphy are now busy experimenting on a system of attunement, or syntony, by which it will be possible to so adjust the sending instruments that none but the receiver for whom the message is meant can receive it. He is working on the principle whereby one tuning-fork, when set vibrating, will set another of the same pitch humming. This problem is practically solved now, and in the near future every station, every ship, and each installation will have its own key, and will respond to none other than the particular vibrations, wave lengths, or oscillations, for which it is adjusted.

All through the wonders he has brought about, Marconi, the boy and the man, has shown but little--he is the strong character that does things and says little, and his works speak so amazingly, so loudly, that the personality of the man is obscured.

The Marconi station at Glacé Bay, Cape Breton, is now receiving messages for cableless transmission to England at the rate of ten cents a word--newspaper matter at five cents a word. Transatlantic wireless telegraphy is an everyday occurrence, and the common practical uses are almost beyond mention. It is quite within the bounds of possibility for England to talk clear across to Australia over the Isthmus of Panama, and soon France will be actually holding converse with her strange ally, Russia, across Germany and Austria, without asking the permission of either country. Ships talk to one another while in mid-ocean, separated by miles of salt water. Newspapers have been published aboard transatlantic steamers with the latest news telegraphed while en route; indeed, a regular news service of this kind, at a very reasonable rate, has been established. These are facts; what wonders the future has in store we can only guess. But these are some of the possibilities--news service supplied to subscribers at their homes, the important items to be ticked off on each private instrument automatically, "Marconigraphed" from the editorial rooms; the sending and receiving of messages from moving trains or any other kind of a conveyance; the direction of a submarine craft from a safe-distance point, or the control of a submarine torpedo.

One is apt to grow dizzy if the imagination is allowed to run on too far--but why should not one friend talk to another though he be miles away, and to him alone, since his portable instrument is attuned to but one kind of vibration. It will be like having a separate language for each person, so that "friend communeth with friend, and a stranger intermeddleth not--" and which none but that one person can understand.

SANTOS-DUMONT AND HIS AIR-SHIP

There was a boy in far-away Brazil who played with his friends the game of "Pigeon Flies."

In this pastime the boy who is "it" calls out "pigeon flies," or "bat flies," and the others raise their fingers; but if he should call "fox flies," and one of his mates should raise his hand, that boy would have to pay a forfeit.

The Brazilian boy, however, insisted on raising his finger when the catchwords "man flies" were called, and firmly protested against paying a forfeit.

Alberto Santos-Dumont, even in those early days, was sure that if man did not fly then he would some day.

Many an imaginative boy with a mechanical turn of mind has dreamed and planned wonderful machines that would carry him triumphantly over the tree-tops, and when the tug of the kite-string has been felt has wished that it would pull him up in the air and carry him soaring among the clouds. Santos-Dumont was just such a boy, and he spent much time in setting miniature balloons afloat, and in launching tiny air-ships actuated by twisted rubber bands. But he never outgrew this interest in overhead sailing, and his dreams turned into practical working inventions that enabled him to do what never a mortal man had done before--that is, move about at will in the air.

Perhaps it was the clear blue sky of his native land, and the dense, almost impenetrable thickets below, as Santos-Dumont himself has suggested, that made him think how fine it would be to float in the air above the tangle, where neither rough ground nor wide streams could hinder. At any rate, the thought came into the boy's mind when he was very small, and it stuck there.

His father owned great plantations and many miles of railroad in Brazil, and the boy grew up in the atmosphere of ponderous machinery and puffing locomotives. By the time Santos-Dumont was ten years old he had learned enough about mechanics to control the engines of his father's railroads and handle the machinery in the factories. The boy had a natural bent for mechanics and mathematics, and possessed a cool courage that made him appear almost phlegmatic. Besides his inherited aptitude for mechanics, his father, who was an engineer of the Central School of Arts and Manufactures of Paris, gave him much useful instruction. Like Marconi, Santos-Dumont had many advantages, and also, like the inventor of wireless telegraphy, he had the high intelligence and determination to win success in spite of many discouragements. Like an explorer in a strange land, Santos-Dumont was a pioneer in his work, each trial being different from any other, though the means in themselves were familiar enough.

The boy Santos-Dumont dreamed air-ships, planned air-ships, and read about aerial navigation, until he was possessed with the idea that he must build an air-ship for himself.

He set his face toward France, the land of aerial navigation and the country where light motors had been most highly developed for automobiles. The same year, 1897, when he was twenty-four years old, he, with M. Machuron, made his first ascent in a spherical balloon, the only kind in existence at that time. He has described that first ascension with an enthusiasm that proclaims him a devotee of the science for all time.

His first ascension was full of incident: a storm was encountered; the clouds spread themselves between them and the map-like earth, so that nothing could be seen except the white, billowy masses of vapour shining in the sun; some difficulty was experienced in getting down, for the air currents were blowing upward and carried the balloon with them; the tree-tops finally caught them, but they escaped by throwing out ballast, and finally landed in an open place, and watched the dying balloon as it convulsively gasped out its last breath of escaping gas.

After a few trips with an experienced aeronaut, Santos-Dumont determined to go alone into the regions above the clouds. This was the first of a series of ascensions in his own balloon. It was made of very light silk, which he could pack in a valise and carry easily back to Paris from his landing point. In all kinds of weather this determined sky navigator went aloft; in wind, rain, and sunshine he studied the atmospheric conditions, air currents, and the action of his balloon.

The young Brazilian ascended thirty times in spherical balloons before he attempted any work on an elongated shape. He realised that many things must be learned before he could handle successfully the much more delicate and sensitive elongated gas-bag.

In general, Santos-Dumont worked on the theory of the dirigible balloon--that is, one that might be controlled and made to go in any direction desired, by means of a motor and propeller carried by a buoyant gas-bag. His plan was to build a balloon, cigar-shaped, of sufficient capacity to a little more than lift his machinery and himself, this extra lifting power to be balanced by ballast, so that the balloon and the weight it carried would practically equal the weight of air it displaced. The push of the revolving propeller would be depended upon to move the whole air-ship up or down or forward, just as the motion of a fish's fins and tail move it up, down, forward, or back, its weight being nearly the same as the water it displaces.

The theory seems so simple that it strikes one as strange that the problem of aerial navigation was not solved long ago. The story of Santos-Dumont's experiments, however, his adventures and his successes, will show that the problem was not so simple as it seemed.

Santos-Dumont was built to jockey a Pegasus or guide an air-ship, for he weighed but a hundred pounds when he made his first ascensions, and added very little live ballast as he grew older.

Weight, of course, was the great bugbear of every air-ship inventor, and the chief problem was to provide a motor light enough to furnish sufficient power for driving a balloon that had sufficient lifting capacity to support it and the aeronaut in the air. Steam-engines had been tried, but found too heavy for the power generated; electric motors had been tested, and proved entirely out of the question for the same reason.

Santos-Dumont has been very fortunate in this respect, his success, indeed, being largely due to the compact and powerful gasoline motors that have been developed for use on automobiles.

Even before the balloon for the first air-ship was ordered the young Brazilian experimented with his three-and-one-half horse-power gasoline motor in every possible way, adding to its power, and reducing its weight until he had cut it down to sixty-six pounds, or a little less than twenty pounds to a horse-power. Putting the little motor on a tricycle, he led the procession of powerful automobiles in the Paris-Amsterdam race for some distance, proving its power and speed. The motor tested to his satisfaction, Santos-Dumont ordered his balloon of the famous maker, Lachambre, and while it was building he experimented still further with his little engine. To the horizontal shaft of his motor he attached a propeller made of silk stretched tightly over a light wooden framework. The motor was secured to the aeronaut's basket behind, and the reservoir of gasoline hung to the basket in front. All this was done and tested before the balloon was finished--in fact, the aeronaut hung himself up in his basket from the roof of his workshop and started his motor to find out how much pushing power it exerted and if everything worked satisfactorily.

On September 18, 1898, Santos-Dumont made his first ascension in his first air-ship--in fact, he had never tried to operate an elongated balloon before, and so much of this first experience was absolutely new. Imagine a great bag of yellow oiled silk, cigar-shaped, fully inflated with hydrogen gas, but swaying in the morning breeze, and tugging at its restraining ropes: a vast bubble eighty-two feet long, and twelve feel in diameter at its greatest girth. Such was the balloon of Santos-Dumont's first air-ship. Suspended by cords from the great gas-bag was the basket, to which was attached the motor and six-foot propeller, hung sixteen feet below the belly of the great air-fish.

Many friends and curiosity seekers had assembled to see the aeronaut make his first foolhardy attempt, as they called it. Never before had a spark-spitting motor been hung under a great reservoir of highly inflammable hydrogen gas, and most of the group thought the daring inventor would never see another sunset. Santos-Dumont moved around his suspended air-ship, testing a cord here and a connection there, for he well knew that his life might depend on such a small thing as a length of twine or a slender rod. At one side of a small open space on the outskirts of Paris the long, yellow balloon tugged at its fastenings, while the navigator made his final round to see that all was well. A twist of a strap around the driving-wheel set the motor going, and a moment later Santos-Dumont was standing in his basket, giving the signal to release the air-ship. It rose heavily, and travelling with the fresh wind, the propellers whirling swiftly, it crashed into the trees at the other side of the enclosure. The aeronaut had, against his better judgment, gone with the wind rather than against it, so the power of the propeller was added to the force of the breeze, and the trees were encountered before the ship could rise sufficiently to clear them. The damage was repaired, and two days later, September 20, 1898, the Brazilian started again from the same enclosure, but this time against the wind. The propeller whirled merrily, the explosions of the little motor snapped sharply as the great yellow bulk and the tiny basket with its human freight, the captain of the craft, rose slowly in the air. Santos-Dumont stood quietly in his basket, his hand on the controlling cords of the great rudder on the end of the balloon; near at hand was a bag of loose sand, while small bags of ballast were packed around his feet. Steadily she rose and began to move against the wind with the slow grace of a great bird, while the little man in the basket steered right or left, up or down, as he willed. He turned his rudder for the lateral movements, and changed his shifting bags of ballast hanging fore and aft, pulling in the after bag when he wished to point her nose down, and doing likewise with the forward ballast when he wished to ascend--the propeller pushing up or down as she was pointed. For the first time a man had actual control of an air-ship that carried him. He commanded it as a captain governs his ship, and it obeyed as a vessel answers its helm.

A quarter of a mile above the heads of the pygmy crowd who watched him the little South American maneuvered his air-ship, turning circles and figure eights with and against the breeze, too busy with his rudder, his vibrating little engine, his shifting bags of ballast, and the great palpitating bag of yellow silk above him, to think of his triumph, though he could still hear faintly the shouts of his friends on earth. For a time all went well and he felt the exhilaration that no earth-travelling can ever give, as he experienced somewhat of the freedom that the birds must know when they soar through the air unfettered. As he descended to a lower, denser atmosphere he felt rather than saw that something was wrong--that there was a lack of buoyancy to his craft. The engine kept on with its rapid "phut, phut, phut" steadily, but the air-ship was sinking much more rapidly than it should. Looking up, the aeronaut saw that his long gas-bag was beginning to crease in the middle and was getting flabby, the cords from the ends of the long balloon were beginning to sag, and threatened to catch in the propeller. The earth seemed to be leaping up toward him and destruction stared him in the face. A hand air-pump was provided to fill an air balloon inside the larger one and so make up for the compression of the hydrogen gas caused by the denser, lower atmosphere. He started this pump, but it proved too small, and as the gas was compressed more and more, and the flabbiness of the balloon increased, the whole thing became unmanageable. The great ship dropped and dropped through the air, while the aeronaut, no longer in control of his ship, but controlled by it, worked at the pump and threw out ballast in a vain endeavour to escape the inevitable. He was descending directly over the greensward in the centre of the Longchamps race-course, when he caught sight of some boys flying kites in the open space. He shouted to them to take hold of his trailing guide-rope and run with it against the wind. They understood at once and as instantly obeyed. The wind had the same effect on the air-ship as it has on a kite when one runs with it, and the speed of the fall was checked. Man and air-ship landed with a thud that smashed almost everything but the man. The smart boys that had saved Santos-Dumont's life helped him pack what was left of "Santos-Dumont No. 1" into its basket, and a cab took inventor and invention back to Paris.