Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/64

 transmitter by breaking the sliding contact between them.

To throw on the transmitter and cut off the receiver you simply turned the key back to its normal position and this made the connection between the aerial and tuning coil and at the same time it closed the circuit connecting the source of current with the induction coils.

The up-to-date feature of this set was the storage battery which provided an auxiliary source of current so that in the event of the ship becoming disabled and water flooding the engine room, which would put the dynamo out of commission, the storage battery in the operat-ing room could be thrown in and C Q D could be sent out as long as the wireless room remained above water. This was a mighty good piece of hindsight, for ships that might otherwise have been saved by wireless had gone down at sea with passengers, crew and cargo simply because the dynamos were drowned out.

The receiver was different from the one I used on the Carlos Madino for instead of a crystal detector we had a magnetic detector which Marconi had recently invented. While the magnetic detector was not nearly as sensi