Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/166

 happen to be—that is, I asked him in the deaf and dumb alphabet, and I gathered from the motions he made with his hands and arms that it was in the underground building. I hied me down the stairs and found myself in a small, central area-way from which doors around it opened into the office, receiving, dynamo and sending rooms.

Not being able to read French, as I explained to some officials afterward, I had carelessly opened the door on which the sign read Bureau de Transmitteur instead of Bureau de Telegraphie sans Fil with the result that I saw the whole blooming sending apparatus. There were two operators in charge but they didn’t think I was worth noticing.

The sending apparatus was very much the same as that I saw in the cableless station at Glace Bay. This is easily explained because there is only one way to change a large amount of low pressure electricity such as is generated by an alternating current dynamo into high potential, high frequency electricity and that way is to use a transformer to step up the pressure of the alternating current; condensers are then charged with the latter current and this