The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-11-26
THE WIRELESS
NIGHT SPENT IN A MARCONI
 STATION.
Watching the Process of Transmitting Messages From the sea-Opera- tors Haven't Yet Got Used
 To the Novelty of It.


 A night in the Marconi long distance
 wireless telegraph station at South WelIfieet, on Cape Cod, is night spent In a realm of wonders. It is a night of mysterious sights and sounds enian- ating from things that are in advance
 of the age. says Pearson's Magazine. :. Even the men who are employed there, whose duty 1t is to receive and transmit these wonderful, winged air messages over vast stretches or gray sea, have never become accustomed to the wonder, to the mystery of it all, and the impression one gets of them at their work is that of band of men
 duly sensible of the fact that they are | in close touch with perhaps the great est discovery of all time.
 The band of wonder-workers at South Wellfleet numbers eight men. They are the manager. Mir. Paget; an
 assistant manager; MT. Bangay, chief electrician, a very able man, by the way; an assistant electrician; two operators from the wireless telegraph school at Babylon, l.. l.; an engineer, and an old "Cap'n Bill," late of the salt
 seas, whose duty 1t Is to guard the | inclosure and to see that strangers not properly accredited do not enter
 rival wireless telegraph companies.
 and Marconi has secrets that some of them would like to have.
 It Is not a large place, this mysteri- ous operating room, where the oper- ator now begins his work of talking
 to vessels far out at sea, and every inch of space is utilized. There are mysterious tanks of oil, and sheets of zinc. and strange appliances, and tele- graph keys and saunders, and the like, and the concrete floor is covered with rubber mats which wind in and out among the apparatus in ways as devil ous as those of g labyrinth.
 Suddenly a little brazen bell clangs out a warning that some vessel wishes to talk. Far out at sea, in the dark ness, a thousand or more miles away.
 some man has pressed key. spark has shot to the masthead wires, and then another, and another-each spark starting in shoreward flight. dots and
 dashes which. being caught on the
 overhead wires. have been sucked down
 into the operating room of the sta
 ton, changing the brazen bell In their
 course and then flashing through vari-
 ous appliances designed to record them,
 in the shape of sound, on the telegraph
 instrument
 The message is from the captain of
 the Umbria, and strange 1t seem to
 hear, as 1t were, voice from the deep.
 Even the operator has never got over
 the novelty of this. Here is the mes
 sage:
 Report all well. High head seas.
 Nasty tonight. Sighted derelict Tn
 mid ocean, spoke the Deutschland"
 Then comes messages from the pas
 sengers to friends and relatives ashore,
 and the mental impressions all this
 arouses among the attaches or the
 station are exs the same, night after
 night; their ids are carried far out
 over the dark ocean, out Into the in-
 visible beyond, and they picture the great liner rolling her lonely way among the gray-backed combers, the cabin light flickering fitfully over the waters, the officers on thee dge in their oil-skins with eyes strar.-tng for unseen dangers ahead.