Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/151

 the detector into the ground and this makes a click in the head-phones that sounds like a dot.

When the equipment was packed up Mr. Kemp paid me off—not at the measly rate of a truck driver or a roustabout in St. Johns, but an amount considerably over that which a first-class operator gets and my expenses for a round-voyage beside. I was soon headed once more for New York.

During the next two months Mr. Marconi’s critics were still carping about the cableless signals. And then the inventor put a big one over on them that made them crawl into their holes. In February, 1902, the  sailed from England with the inventor on board. The wireless receiver was of the regulation ship and shore type, that is, it had a coherer and a Morse register, and it was nowhere nearly as sensitive as the detector and telephone receivers used in the Poldhu tests.

Mr. Marconi had arranged for the station at Poldhu to send messages every day at certain times until the Philadelphia arrived at New York. He adjusted the ship’s receiver himself and from the time she left England messages sent from the Poldhu station were printed on