What is the Principle of the Wireless Telegraphy?

Drop a stone in a pool of water. Circular waves or ripples will travel outward in all directions. That is the principle of wireless telegraph.

If a chip be floating on the water it will be rocked by each ripple, just as a wireless receiving station will respond to the electrical waves or impulses that make up a wireless message. It is not known just how the invisible wireless waves are propelled through space, but they travel through the ether in the air in very much the same way as do sound waves. The electrical signals, too, are received only by apparatus that is attuned to them; that is, they can not be heard except at wireless stations, any more than sound can be heard by the ears of a deaf person.

The wireless waves have a definite length, can be measured in feet or meters, and are regulated according to the distance the message is to travel. Stations that send a few hundred miles use a wave length of six hundred meters, or less, while at the powerful land stations used for trans-atlantic work the wave lengths used run into as many thousands.

Why Don’t the Messages Go to the Wrong Stations?

So that the hundreds of messages hurtling through space at the same time will not interfere, the wireless stations are equipped with tuning-apparatus through which they can adjust their wave length to receive the particular message desired. A different wave length is used by each ship or wireless shore station, and even though dozens of messages fill the air, the minute the wireless operator adjusts his tuner to the length of the station he is after, that particular message stands out very strongly and all the others grow dim.

How Does the Wireless Reach Ships at Sea?

All ships at sea report their positions regularly; thus it is a simple matter for a shore station to send a wireless message to the ship to which it is addressed. For example, the Marconi station at Sea Gate, New York, wants to reach the Lusitania. The operator looks up that vessel on the list and notes her call signal and wave length. He adjusts his tuner to correspond and calls her signal, M F A, repeating it three times.

The wireless man on the vessel, knowing that he is within range of a shore station, has set his tuner at the wave length assigned to him and is listening. When his call letters are heard, he acknowledges them and signals to go ahead with the message. When it has been given, the Sea Gate station “signs off” with its call letters W S E and the ship operator enters in his record that that particular message reached him via the Marconi station at Sea Gate. Thus, with the wide variety in wave lengths, no confusion of messages exists and any desired ship or shore station can be called, just as a direct telephone connection is secured by giving the central station the call number of the subscriber wanted.

What Kind of Signs Are Used in the Wireless?

The actual wireless message is composed of dots and dashes, which, in certain combinations, stand for certain letters of the alphabet. This is done through opening and closing the electrical circuit by pressing a key, a sharp touch forming a dot and a longer pressure a dash, as with the wire telegraph.

If secrecy in a wireless message is wanted, the words are sent in cipher which, of course, cannot be understood by outsiders. The Government sends thousands of words each day without a single word meaning anything to the wireless stations that happen to be “listening in.” While it is true that any one owning a wireless receiving set may listen to messages flying through the air, every person within hearing who understands the Morse Code can read the telegrams that come into a telegraph office. Knowledge thus gained, however, is of little value, as the law provided heavy penalties for disclosing the contents of any kind of telegraph message.

What Does a Wireless Equipment Consist of?

The various apparatus that comprises a wireless equipment can not be properly explained without the use of technical language, but the general principle of operation is somewhat as follows: If a small loop of copper wire, with a slight separation between the ends, is placed across a room from an electric spark, it will be slightly affected. Increase the electrical current to far greater power and control it, and the invisible electrical wave may be thrown many miles. To send a message across the ocean, the current used by the modern wireless station is so powerful that it will pass through storm and fog, even through mountains, without losing much of its force. When this tremendous force is released by pressing the telegraph key, it leaps from the aerial wires, or antennae, travels across the Atlantic and is picked up by a corresponding aerial, attuned to receive the signal.

The aerial, or antennae, as it is called in a wireless work, is made up of copper wires. On a ship these are strung between the masts, usually consisting of two, four or six wires held apart by crosspieces. Two or more wires lead down from this to the wireless cabin.

The coil or transformer is the apparatus which produces the spark that forms the electrical waves. In small stations, the length and thickness of the spark and the speed of vibration is regulated by a thumb screw. Transformers are used when the power is taken from the alternating current of an electric light circuit.

The gap, which the electrical current jumps when the telegraph key is pressed down, is composed of two rods which slide together or apart to vary the length of the spark.

The simplest type of sending station consists of the antenna, battery, coil, wireless key and spark gap. If a change in wave length is desired a transmitting tuning coil must be added.

The receiving apparatus contains a detector, which is chiefly two mineral points lightly touching and connected with a sensitive head telephone. The incoming signals are heard as long and short buzzing sounds corresponding to the dots and dashes. The receiving tuning coil, used to adjust wave lengths, is operated by simply moving sliding contacts along a bar until the signals are more plainly heard. While the large stations have more complicated apparatus, the principle remains the same.

How High Do Wireless Masts Have to be?

The towering masts of the Marconi Trans-Oceanic stations are often supposed to rise to their great height, so that an antennae will be raised above the obstructions between. If this were necessary, two wireless stations separated by the Atlantic would have to have masts one hundred and twenty-five miles high to rise above the curvature of the earth. The path of the wireless waves, however, is not in a straight line, but follows the curvature of the earth. Scientists explain this by saying the rarefied air above the earth’s surface acts as a shell enclosing the globe.

The speed of wireless messages is placed at 186,000 miles per second. A wireless message will thus cross the Atlantic in about one-nineteenth of a second—a period of time too small for the human mind to grasp. In other words, the wireless flash crosses in a fraction of a second a distance that the earth requires five hours to turn on its axis and the fastest ships take nearly a week to cross.

The longest distance over which a wireless message can be sent is not definitely known; the present record was made in September, 1910, by Marconi from Clifden, Ireland, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, a distance of 6700 miles.

The Man Who Invented Wireless Telegraphy.

Communication without wires for thousands of miles across oceans, from continent to continent, is a far cry from sending a wireless impulse the length of a kitchen table. That is the development of twenty years.

To properly trace the development of wireless telegraphy, however, it is necessary to go back eighty-three years to when, in 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electro-magnetic induction between two entirely separate circuits. Steinheil, of Munich, too, in 1838, suggested that the metallic portion of a grounded electrical circuit might be dispensed with and a system of wireless telegraphy established. Then, in 1859, Bowman Lindsay demonstrated to the British Association his method of transmitting messages by means of magnetism through and across the water without submerged wires. In 1867 James Clerk Maxwell laid down the theory of electro-magnetism and predicted the existence of the electric waves that are now used in wireless telegraphy. Dolbear, of Tufts College, in 1836, patented a plan for establishing wireless communication by means of two insulated elevated plates, but there is no evidence that the method proposed by him effected the transmission of signals between stations separated by any distance. A year later Heinrich Rudolph Hertz discovered the progressive propagation of electro-magnetic action through space and accomplished the most valuable work in this period of speculation and experiment.

Just twenty years ago, at his father’s country home in Bologna, Guglielmo Marconi, then a lad just out of his ’teens, read of the experiments of Hertz and conceived the first wireless telegraph apparatus. This was completed some months later and a message in the Morse Code was transmitted a distance of three or four feet, the length of the table on which the apparatus rested.

Satisfied that he had laid the foundation of an epoch-making discovery young Marconi pursued his experiments and filed the first patent on the subject on June 2, 1896. Further experiments were carried on in London during that year and at the request of Sir William H. Preece, of the British Post Office, official tests were made, first over a distance of about 100 yards and later for one and three-quarter miles.

During the year following Mr. Marconi gave several demonstrations to the officials of the various European governments and communication was established up to 34 miles. In July of this year, 1897, the first commercial wireless telegraph company was incorporated in England and the first Marconi station was erected at the Needles, Isle of Wight.

On June 3, 1898, Lord Kelvin visited this station and sent the first paid Marconigram. A month later the events of the Kingstown Regatta in Dublin were reported by wireless telegraphy for a local newspaper from the steamer “Flying Huntress.” In August of that year the royal yacht “Osborn” was equipped with a wireless set, in order that Queen Victoria might communicate with the Prince of Wales, who was at Ladywood Cottage and suffering from the results of an accident to his knee. For sixteen days, constant and uninterrupted communication was maintained. Then on Christmas Eve was inaugurated the first lightship wireless service, messages being sent from the East Goodwin lightship to the lighthouse at South Foreland.

Three months later the first marine rescue was effected through this installation. The steamship “R. F. Matthews” ran into the lightship and lifeboats from the South Foreland station promptly responded to the wireless appeal for aid. The most important wireless event abroad during the year 1899 was the establishing of communication across the English Channel, a distance of thirty miles.

The American public next learned something of Marconi’s invention, for in September and October of that year wireless telegraphy was employed in reporting the International yacht races between the “Shamrock” and the “Columbia” for a New York newspaper. At the conclusions of the races, the naval authorities requested a series of trials, during which wireless messages were exchanged between the cruiser “New York” and the battleship “Massachusetts” up to a distance of about 36 miles. On leaving America, Marconi fitted the liner “St. Paul” with his apparatus and when 36 miles from the Needles Station, secured wireless reports of the war in South Africa. These were printed aboard the vessel in a leaflet called “The Transatlantic Times,” the first of the chain of wireless newspapers now published daily on practically all passenger steamships. Six field wireless sets were dispatched to South Africa about this time and were later of considerable service in the Boer War.

The year 1900 brought the first commercial wireless contracts. By agreement with the Norddeutscher Lloyd, Marconi apparatus was installed on a lightship, a lighthouse and aboard the liner “Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse.” On July 4th the British Admiralty entered into a contract for the installation of Marconi apparatus on thirty-two warships and shore stations and the erection of the high power station at Poldhu was commenced.

Work on similar station at Cape Cod was begun early in 1901 and on August 12th the famous Nantucket Island and Nantucket lightship stations opened to report incoming vessels by wireless. Heavy gales in September and November wrecked the masts at both Poldhu and Cape Cod stations and these were replaced by four wooden towers, 210 feet high. Important experimental work was then shifted to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and on December 12th and 13th, signals were received across the Atlantic from Poldhu. This to Marconi was a great achievement and the forerunner of the present day trans-atlantic service. But with the announcement that the long dreamt of feat had been accomplished a flood of vituperation from scientific men was let loose. It was nonsense; it was deliberate deception; the reading was in error, were among the comments. Another prank of the “young man with a box,” one scientist termed it. It is amusing now to recall this extraordinary treatment, but it was hardly so amusing to the young inventor, then in his twenty-seventh year.

But in spite of the skepticism, developments followed rapidly from then on and in 1902, the year in which the American Marconi Company was established, full recognition to wireless telegraphy was given by the various governments.

The wonderful growth of the Marconi system within the last twelve years is well known to all and does not require detailing. But in view of its youth as an industry and its inauspicious beginning, a glimpse into what the present day Marconi system comprises may be interesting.

More than 1800 ships are equipped with Marconi wireless and its shore stations are landmarks in practically every country on the globe.

Press and commercial messages are transmitted daily from continent to continent direct.

Shore to ship and ship to shore business each year runs into millions of words.

Marconi wireless within seventeen years, has become an absolute necessity in the maritime field, an invaluable aid in others. Regular communication has been established with icebound settlements and desert communities, and official running orders transmitted to moving railway trains. Its service is dependable under all conditions and embraces activities and locations inaccessible to any other telegraph system. Continuous service is maintained and wireless messages for all parts of the world at greatly reduced rates are received at any Western Union Office.

The direction finder and wireless compass are recent Marconi inventions.

A wide variety of types of Marconi equipment are designed for the merchant marine, warships, submarines, pleasure craft, motor cars and railroad trains; also portable signal corps sets, apparatus for aircraft, cavalry sets, knapsack sets and high-power installations for trans-ocean communication.

How Does a Fly Walk Upside Down?

There is a little sucker on the end of each of the fly’s feet which makes his foot stick to the ceiling or any other place he walks, and which he can control at will. It is made very much like the sucker you have seen with which a boy can pick up a flat stone—a circular piece of rubber or leather with a string in the middle and more or less bell shaped underneath. A boy can pick up a flat stone with this kind of a sucker by pressing the rubber or leather part down flat on the stone and then pulling gently on it by the string. When he does this he simply expels the air which is between the leather part of the sucker and the stone, which creates a vacuum and the pressure of the air on the outside part of the leather enables him to pick it up. The fly has little suckers like these on each of his feet, and they act automatically when he puts his foot down. Of course the sticking power of each foot is adjusted to the weight of the fly, just as the sticking or lifting power of the boy’s sucker is regulated by the weight of the stone or other object he tries to pick up. If the weight of the object is sufficient to overcome the sticking power which the vacuum creates, the stone cannot be lifted.

What Is Money?

It is quite difficult to give a broad definition of money that will be understood by all, for in different ages and lands many things have been used as money besides the coins and bills which we think of only when we think at all what money is. Anything that passes freely from hand to hand in a community in the payment of debts and for goods purchased, accepted freely by the person who offers it without any reference to the person who offers it, and which can be in turn used by the person accepting it to give to some one else in payment of debt or for the purchase of goods, is money. This is rather a long sentence and perhaps difficult to understand, and so we will try to analyze what this means. If some one offered you a pretty stone as money in payment of a debt, it would be as good as any kind of money if you in turn could pass it on to any other person to whom you owed a debt or in payment of something you bought. The stone might appear to you to be valuable but it would not be good money unless you could count on every one else in the community accepting it at the same value. If everybody accepts it at the same value, it is as good as any kind of money. So that anything which is acceptable to the people in any community as a unit of value to pay debts, is good money, provided everybody thinks so and accepts it that way. In this case, then any kind of substance might become money provided it was used and accepted by everyone.

Why Do We Need Money?

We need money for the sake of the convenience which it provides in making the exchange of one kind of wealth for another and as a standard of value. When a community has adopted something or anything which is regarded by all of the people as a standard of value, all of the difficulties of trading disappear.

Who Originated Money?

The earliest tribes of savages did not need money because no individual in the tribe owned anything personally. All the property of the tribe belonged to the tribe as a whole and not to any particular person. Later on, when different groups of savages came into contact with each other, there arose the custom of bartering or exchanging things which one tribe possessed and which the other tribe wanted. In that way arose the business of trading or of what we call doing business, and soon the need of something by which to measure the values of different things arose. Some of the old Australian tribes had a tough green stone which was valuable for making hatchets. Members of another tribe would see some of this stone and notice what good hatchets could be made from it—better hatchets than they had been able to make. Naturally they wanted it so much that it became very valuable in their eyes and so they came wanting to buy green stones. But they had nothing like what we could call money today. They had, however, a good deal of red ochre in their lands which they used to paint their bodies. They got this red ochre out of the ground on their own lands just as the other tribe got green stones out of its ground, and those who owned the green stones which were good for making hatchets, wanted some red ochre very much, and so they traded green stones for red ochre. The green stones then took on a value in themselves for making exchanges for various commodities, and before long became a kind of money inside and outside the community so that when they wanted to obtain anything, the price was put by the merchant as so many green stones and he accepted these in payment for goods given in exchange. He was willing to do this because he knew he could use them in making trades for almost anything he might want, provided he had enough of the green stones. So you see these green stones of the Australian tribe became a rudimentary kind of money, just because a desire had arisen to possess them; and the red ochre was actual money in the same sense, for when this tribe found that other tribes would value this red ochre, they began getting the things they wanted and paying for them in red ochre. But the “unit of value” had to be developed to make a currency that was elastic. It required something that could be carried about easily—in fact it had to be something small enough so a number of units of value could be carried about without too much trouble. The Indians of British Columbia solved this difficulty of making an elastic currency by adopting as a unit of value a haiqua shell which they wore in strings as ornamental borders of their dresses—and one string of these shells was worth one beaver’s skin. These shells then were real money and one of the earliest forms of it.

The skins of animals were long used by savage tribes as money. The skins were valuable in trading and a man’s fortune was reckoned by the number of skins he owned. As soon as the animals became domesticated, however, the whole animal replaced the skin as the unit of value. This change undoubtedly came because a whole animal is more valuable than only its skin. The first skins obtainable however were worn by wild animals—the kind that the people could not deliver to someone else alive and whole. But when the animals became domesticated, which meant that man tamed them and kept them where he could control them at will, the skin and the wild animal ceased to be a unit of value because it was an uncertain kind of money. Among domestic animals, oxen and sheep were the earliest forms of money—an ox was considered worth ten sheep. This idea of using cattle as money was used by many tribes in many lands. We find traces of it in the laws of Iceland. The Latin word pecunia (pecus) shows that the earliest Roman money was composed of cattle. The English word fee indicates this also. The Irish law records show the same evidence of the use of cattle as money and within recent years the cattle still form the basis of the currency of the Zulus and Kaffirs.

When slavery became prominent many lands adopted the slaves as the unit of value. A man’s wealth was reckoned by the number of slaves he owned.

Then, when the practice of agriculture became more common, people used the products of the soil as money—maize, olive oil, cocoanuts, tea and corn—the latter is said to pass current as actual money in certain parts of Norway now. They used these products of the soil for money even in our own country. Our ancestors in Maryland and Virginia before the Revolutionary War, and even after, used tobacco as money. They passed laws making tobacco money and paid the salaries of the government officials and collected all taxes in tobacco.

Other early forms of money were ornaments and these serve the purpose of money among all uncivilized tribes. In India they used cowrie shells—a small yellowish-white shell with a fine gloss. The Fiji Islanders used whales’ teeth; some of the South Sea Island tribes used red feathers; other nations used mineral products as money—such as salt in Abyssinia and Mexico.

Up to this point we have talked about the things used as money from the standpoint of primitive forms of money. Today the metals have practically driven all these other crude forms of money out.

Metallic Forms of Money.

The use of metals as money goes far back in the history of civilization but it has never been possible to trace the historical order of the adoption of the various metals for the purposes. Iron according to the statement of Aristotle was at one time extensively used as money. Copper, in conjunction with iron, was used in early times as money in China; and until comparatively a short time ago was used for the coins of smaller value in Japan. Iron spikes were used in Central Africa and nails in Scotland; lead money is now used in Burmah. Copper has long been used as money. The early coins of England were made of tin. Finally, however, came silver and silver was the principal form of money up to a few years ago. It was the basis of Greek coins introduced at Rome in 269 B. C. Most of the money of Medieval times was composed of silver.

The earliest traces of gold used as money is seen in pictures of ancient Egyptians “weighing in scales heaps of gold and silver rings.”

Why Do We Use Gold and Silver as Money Principally?

There are a good many reasons why gold and silver have become almost universal materials for use as money. Perhaps this will be better understood if these reasons are set down in order.

1st. It is necessary that the material out of which money is made should be valuable, but nothing was ever used as money that had not first become desirable and, therefore, valuable as money. This is only one of the incidental reasons for taking gold and silver for coining money.

2nd. To serve its purpose best, money should be easy to carry around—in other words, its value should be high in proportion to its weight.

The absence of this quality made the early forms of money such as skins, corn, tobacco, etc., undesirable. It was difficult to carry very much money about. Imagine the skin of a sheep worth a dollar, say, and having to carry ten of them down to pay the grocer. To a certain extent this difficulty occurred with iron and copper money and in times when they used live cattle it was a pretty expensive job to pay your debts because, while the cattle could move, it was still expensive to drive them from place to place. A man who accepted a thousand cattle in payment had to go to some expense in getting them home. Then it was expensive to have money when live cattle were used because the cattle, of course, had to be fed and from that point of view the poor man who had no money was better off than the rich man who had money. When cattle were used as money it cost a lot to keep it. Our kind of money doesn’t eat anything; in fact, if you put it in a savings bank, it will earn interest money for you. But when cattle were used as money it cost a great deal to keep them and so it was worse than not earning any interest.

3rd. Another quality that money should possess is divisibility without damage and also the quality of being united again. This quality is possessed by the metals in every sense because they can be fused, while skins and precious stones suffer in value greatly when they are divided.

4th. The material out of which money is made should be the same throughout in quality and weight so that one unit of money should be worth as much as any other unit. This could never be true of skins or cattle as the difference in the size of skins is very great sometimes, and a small skin from the same animal could not be worth as much as a large one, or a skin of an animal of inferior quality so valuable as a very fine one.

5th. Another quality which money should possess is durability. This requirement made it necessary to use something else besides animals or vegetable substances. Animals die and vegetables will not keep and so lose their value. Even iron is apt to rust and through that process lose more or less of its value.

6th. The materials out of which money is made should be easy to distinguish and their value easy to determine. For this reason such things as precious stones are not good to use as money because it takes an expert to determine their value and even they are not always certain to be correct.

7th. Then a very important quality that the material out of which money is made is that its value should be steady. The value of cattle varies very greatly and, in fact, most of the materials out of which the first currencies were made were subject to quick change in value in a short time. The value of gold and silver does not change excepting at long intervals. Gold and silver are both durable and easily recognizable. They can be melted, divided and united. The same is true of other metallic substances, but iron as stated is subject to rust and its value is low; lead is too soft. Tin will break, and both of them and copper also are of low value. Gold and silver change only slowly in value when the change at all; they do not lose any of their value by age, rust or other cause; they are hard metals and do not, therefore, wear. Their value in proportion to the bulk of the pieces used for money is so large that the money made from them can be carried without discomfort and it is almost impossible to imitate them.

Who Made the First Cent?

Vermont was the first state to issue copper cents. In June, 1785, she granted the authority to Ruben Harmon, Jr., to make money for the state for two years. In October of the same year, Connecticut granted the right to coin 10,000 pounds in copper cents, known as the Connecticut cent of 1785. Massachusetts, in 1786, established a mint and coined $60,000 in cents and half cents. In the same year, New Jersey granted the right to coin $10,000 at 15 coppers to the shilling. In 1781 the Continental Congress directed Robert Morris to investigate the matter of governmental coinage. He proposed a standard based on the Spanish dollar, consisting of 100 units, each unit to be called a cent. His plan was rejected. In 1784, Jefferson proposed to Congress, that the smallest coin should be of copper, and that 200 of them should pass for one dollar. The plan was adopted, but in 1786, 100 was substituted. In 1792 the coinage of copper cents, containing 264 grains, and half cents in proportion, was authorized; their weight was subsequently reduced. In 1853 the nickel cent was substituted and the half cent discontinued, and in 1864 the bronze cent was introduced, weighing 48 grains and consisting of 95 per cent. of copper, and the remainder of tin and zinc.

How Did the Name Uncle Sam Originate?

The name Uncle Sam is a jocular name long in use for the Government of the United States.

Shortly after the war of 1812 was declared, Elbert Anderson of New York State, who was a contractor for the army, went to Troy, New York, to purchase a quantity of provisions. At that place the provisions were inspected, the official inspectors being two brothers named Wilson—Ebenezer and Samuel. The latter was very popular among the men and was known as “Uncle Sam Wilson” and everybody called him that. The boxes in which the provisions were packed were stamped with four letters, E. A. for Elbert Anderson, and U. S. for United States. One of the men engaged in making the inspection asked another of the workmen who happened to be a jocular fellow, what the letters E. A. U. S. on the boxes stood for. He said in reply that he did not know but thought they probably meant Elbert Anderson and Uncle Sam Wilson, and that they had left off the W which would stand for Wilson. The suggestion caught on quickly and as such things often do, the joke spread rapidly so that everybody soon thought of the name “Uncle Sam” whenever they saw the letters U. S. on anything or in any place.

The suit of striped trousers and long tailed coat and beaver hat in which Uncle Sam is now always represented in pictures, was the inspiration of the famous cartoonist.