Alexandre had invited Tyler and myself to a party at his house that evening, but when the time came, Tyler decided to remain at home. The luncheon had proved a bit too much for him, so I was forced to go alone. The guests assembled in Alexandre's outdoor dining-room, a small place with lattice walls and only one door. Berard was there with a guitar, the captain of the schooner Guisborne, a giant Tahitian, also the engineer of the Guisborne, and several girls. In the centre of the room, on a table, were refreshments. We were so crowded we could hardly move and Berard immediately commenced singing so that I thought the place would fall in on us. Guests continued to arrive, Juan, a little negro from Portuguese East Africa, Bastien, a Frenchman who worked in Maxwell's store, and Teiki. The jour de gloire was beginning to tell on Teiki. She attempted a hula, but her hips, for the first time, refused to wave, although I have no doubt she thought she was dancing as usual.

The captain of the Guisborne had a fearful voice. I began to regret that I had come. We sang "Over There" and "Tipperary"-the latter with Tahitian words. Alexandre attempted to waltz.with the ladies, with indifferent success, owing to the presence of many pairs of feet and also to the fact that the ladies could not waltz in the first place. Meanwhile the company was demanding more songs and Berard was trying to make himself heard above the uproar. A string had snapped, did any one have a new guitar string?

Presently we were aware that somebody outside was clamoring for admission. After things had quieted down so that we could hear, we discovered that the intruder was one of the administrator's convicts, in a sad state of intoxication. How he had gotten out of the calaboose was a mystery. He expressed a desire to come in and murder the captain of the Guisborne. The captain of the Guisborne retorted that nothing was nearer to his heart than to have the opportunity of mauling the son of a Tahitian swine who stood outside, and tearing him limb from limb. Whereupon the ladies all screamed in dismay. We attempted to reason with the convict through the lattice, but he commenced to kick the house down.

Meanwhile the captain was raging like a lion, imploring us to let him out. He would finish the cochon. He did get out finally and fell up against the convict in the dark and the two rolled in the mud together.

I had had about enough of this party, and as it was a good opportunity to go, I went back to my house and turned in. Tyler was awake and feeling much better. There was still great excitement at Alexandre's house. Then came a long silence, and just as I was dropping off to sleep I heard the fearful, raucous voice of the captain of the Guisborne raised triumphantly in song, to the accompaniment of fists pounding a table and a very uncertain guitar:

"Dites-moi (oui! oui! oui!) Dites-moi (oui! oui! oui!) Dites-moi si le vin est bon."

JADIO is in the air, electrically, vocally, and popularly. It might seem that almost every detail and feature from binding-posts to wave lengths, and from audions to audiences, has been described, discussed, and broadcasted. But it is a fascinating subject, inviting intense scientific analysis and research on the one hand, while bidding for popular interest and discussion on the other. Developments and new devices for greater perfection in transmission and efficiency in receiving are coming so fast that even those of us who have a running start of several years in the game are finding it hard to keep up with the pace-makers. The possibilities of radio telephony do not appear to have VOL. LXXII.-15

been touched as yet. New applications crowd upon the heels of achievements that seem epoch-making. The public is in a wild scramble to get in line for the new sport, the manufacturers are working overtime to supply the demand for receivers, and new broadcasting stations make their initial announcements to the swelling audience of silent listeners every few days. Using as a medium that elusive, all-pervading something which physicists have named ether, radio begins with a stupendous mystery. Bringing into our very homes by the relatively simple means of its coils, condensers, and bulbs the utterances of those far away on sea and land, the voices of preachers, opera-singers, orators, and leaders of thought, as well as the music of great bands, orchestras, and virtuosi, radio adds another element to the list of applied scientific and technical

225

In my own home, in what was once the little back bedroom, long since become the radio room, there stands a complete radio receiving outfit. It is a good-looking piece of apparatus, for have not a number of my friends told me so voluntarily? It comes under the old definition also which says "handsome is as handsome does," for this receiving set puts that little back room in touch with about everything on this side of the world, and occasionally reaches part way round on the other side when the ether is behaving itself. It has given us, the members of my family, and including many good neighbors, friends, and visitors, a long succession of pleasant evenings, filled with delightful surprises, amusing and pleasing entertainment, impressive attendance upon the services in great churches, flashes from the keys of wireless cabins in the greyhounds of the sea, and concise notes on world events flying from the towering masts of powerful trans-oceanic radio stations. It is the purpose here to tell not so much of the science and art of radio communication as to relate something of what we have overheard from the vantagepoint of our little back room.

The instrument cabinets making up the receiving outfit in this radio room bear no manufacturers' name-plates. The makers are not ashamed of their product at all. The reason for the omission is simple in that we made them ourselves. The firstclass scout who salutes me as his scoutmaster, and at the same time calls me "dad," worked manfully with me while we wound our coils of nights in the kitchen, soldered the connections at the gas-stove after the cook was through, then risked our necks and the good opinions of our neighbors as we scrambled on the roof to stick up a contraption that looked like a cross between a giant's hammock and a snare for eagles. Nobody had ever seen or heard of anything like it before, and the same kind neighbors who watched the roof-climbing performance out of the corners of questioning eyes turned doubtful ears a little later when told that we were setting our watches every night by the big clock at Washington, or had heard Key West talking to

ing when we invited those same doubting neighbors in to hear for themselves. They could not be expected to make anything out of that mosquito buzz which squeaked out the time and the weather from the Naval Observatory at Arlington, or understand that wail like a lost soul which was speaking plain English if you only knew the world-wide code which the operator out on the tip-end island in the Gulf was using. Maybe it was so and maybe not. Who could tell but what some boy in the next block was fooling you? Yes, they could hear a little noise when they had those funny dinguses on their ears, but it was too much to think that such a faint little noise could come so far. Why, think of all the noises so much greater all along the way! One little toot of a train-whistle anywhere between there and here would put it out of business. Oh! Well, it was all foolishness after all. What did any one want to putter around at such things for? The newspapers gave more news than you could read, and in plain print that any one could understand.

It must not be understood that we made the present complete, efficient receiving outfit all at once. We didn't know how, and no one else did for that matter, even though that was only eight years ago. There was not a single piece of complete wireless apparatus for sale at that time in our town of more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. Bindingposts and insulators had to be ordered from New York. We bought some bare copper wire and brass rods at a hardware store, a few pieces of mahogany at a veneer-mill; wound our tuning coils on empty oatmeal cartons, figuring some of the dimensions from meagre notes found in some book, but guessing at the greater part of it within the limits of the size of the oatmeal boxes. Then we hooked it up to antenna and ground wire and listened. Not a sound the first evening, nor the second, nor yet the third. One of the scouts in our troop who had a small wireless set came and looked it over, made some suggestions, but finally admitted that he did not know what was the matter. We kept on trying every adjustment and connection we could think of, and one

evening were overjoyed to hear a faint buzz going long and short. Having been a Morse operator years before, it was comparatively easy for me to make out that it was an amateur in our own town talking to his chum a few blocks away. That first faint little buzz in the receiver telephones was our starting-signal, and we have been going ever since with constantly growing interest, increasing knowledge, and a widening field. Each radical advance in methods or construction of instruments announced in the magazines sent us after more mahogany, copper wire, binding-posts, and other parts. The good wife and scout-mother grew tired of our fussing around in the kitchen, so we retreated to the attic and kept on winding coils and making cabinets, going on many blind trails, but marking well the high spots of success.

What excitement stirred the household when we heard the great Arlington station for the first time! Each member of the family listened in turn to the big observatory clock ticking off the seconds, mother set the family clock when the stroke of nine came, then all gathered round and watched the pencil as I wrote the weather forecast. Sister ran for the atlas, and we figured from the map that Arlington was about seven hundred miles away as the wireless waves fly. Coming home one night after the folks had retired, a voice from the little back bedroom called out: "Hey! dad, you missed it by being away from home to-night. The wireless is going like a house afire." So I slipped in and tuned up just for a sample. Sure enough, the air was full. Some station with a high, clear spark came in particularly fine. Soon I heard him say: "This is Fort Sam Houston testing a new key. Give us a call. This is WUJ." To bed then with strange thoughts, and the next morning a letter went to the radio station at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. In a few days there came an official-looking envelope bearing the imprint "War Department, Radio Station, Fort Sam Houston, Texas." The letter in this envelope read:

"SIR:

In reply to your communication of the 15th instant, will say that I was very

Some folks are saying, these days, that you can't hear anything on a crystal more than twenty-five miles away. Well, Fort Sam Houston is nine hundred miles from our town, and up to this time we had been working with a crystal detector and a simple loose coupler. On a business trip to Denver early in 1916, I spotted a wellbuilt antenna high above the Y. M. C. A. building, and followed the lead-in wire to a room up in the tower. There was installed an outfit that would have made any wireless bug's fingers tingle to get hold of the switches. A greeting in the lingo brought a friendly response at once from the man sitting alone at the instruments, a retired Western Union press operator, working at wireless as a pastime. For several nights I sat in with him, listening to new wonders. From that high tower on the hill in the mile-high-city we heard ships far out at sea and several stations on the other side. A little glowing vacuum-tube detector was the centre of interest in the outfit. Fired with a new ambition, I placed an order then and there for one of the tubes, and a few other parts to make up a similar receiving set, and obtained a copy of the "hook-up." Home again, to tell the story to the eager firstclass scout, with renewed feverish activity in the attic workshop. After some three weeks' work, we had the new cabinets made, the little tube mounted, batteries connected, and then-would the same outfit that worked so well in the high, dry air of Denver, do the same in Indiana? The receivers soon answered the question with startling affirmation. Steamers on the Gulf and the Atlantic were heard and marked in the call-book, literally dozens in a single evening. Sayville and Tuckerton, famous later on in

the Great War, tuned in as clear as a fiddle-string at any time, day or night. The horizon of the little back bedroom was widening in tremendous jumps.

Then came the dark days of 1917, when, obeying drastic orders from the War Department, we sorrowfully took down our antenna, disconnected our bulbs and cabinets, and packed them all away in a corner of the attic. There was silence, not only as St. John records in the Apocalypse "for the space of half an hour," but for two long years. With the return of peace on earth we pulled out the packing-box, dusted off the instruments, and, in three days after the lifting of the ban on receiving, pulled the antenna to the tops of the masts and "hooked up" again. With the first glow of the vacuum tube, here was our old friend NAJ, the Great Lakes Training Station, pounding away as if there had been no intermission. A few ships were heard that night, strangely scattering, and the big stations were going. But not an amateur was to be heard, nor yet a single one of the commercial stations, for the ban on transmitting still held. The wireless world had received an awful jolt. But we were back in our listening-post, ready to hear whatever came to us out of the air. It was not long until, hearing of a new device called a two-step amplifier, we put our heads together, figured out how to do it, made another mahogany cabinet, mounted the tubes and switches, and coupled it up with the tuner. Everything within hearing jumped, at that instant, several hundred miles nearer. With the resumption of general transmission a little later, we kept spotting station after station far beyond our former range. We don't know yet just what may be the limit with this powerful aid to the radio ear.

One night in the spring of 1920, sitting at the wireless desk writing a letter to the first-class scout away at college, with the "listening-bonnet" over my ears, picking up on the side as I wrote occasional snatches of messages or the chatter of operators, there suddenly boomed out of the night a full round masculine voice speaking plain English: "Hello! hello! hello! This is the Aviation Repair Station at the Indianapolis Speedway talking. We are going to play you some selec

tions on the phonograph." An excited call to the folks down-stairs, and they came hurrying up to listen for the first time to music through the ether. When the last page of the letter to the boy scout was written, after an hour's intermission, it told him that the wireless telephone, of which we had been reading for some time, had made connection with our homemade receiving set in the little back room. It was not long until we heard the radiophone station at Anacostia, just out of Washington, D. C., and a few months later Pittsburgh started its splendid series of entertainments. Still the good neighbors and friends were incredulous, indulgently smiling at our tales of this new phase of the wireless. Some came to listen and wonder, but departed with doubtful expressions as to any practical use ever being made of it.

But what a change has come. Really, it does an old-time radio-bug's soul good nowadays to be stopped on the street, or cornered at the club, by one of these erstwhile doubting friends, who pulls out an envelope with some scribbled figures and diagrams on the back, and, with great seriousness of manner and cordiality of approach, proceeds to ask a lot of questions about "this wireless business." "Putting in an outfit?" we venture. "Oh! Just thinking some about it, that's all." Then on the way home that evening we spot a couple of wires strung from his house to a pole on the garage. Another radio fan started on the road. And this newcomer in the radio field, dabbling in the most startling product of the modern development of electrical science, will, of a certainty, along with thousands of fellow dabblers, find plenty of amusement of a novel and thrilling sort. One newspaper humorist ventured the remark that the only trouble with radio music was that you had to stay at home to hear it. But staying at home is not what it used to be. The farmer's wife is in almost as complete touch with the world's doings as is her city sister. The rural mail-service, telephone, and automobile have worked wonders. Now comes the crowning addition to this list, the wonder of wonders for city home and country home alike. For, by the comparatively simple magic of the radiophone, it is possible to stay at