Adventure, December 1914 — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Stolen held us back. The coherer is often spas- modic. We can’t always depend on it. ‘Well, I suppose you are acquainted with Hammond’s mercury-steel disk coherer? I have improved on even that. So, I may say, we come finally to this coherer which I myself have invented for the special pur- pose of wireless-controlled vehicles of all kinds.” _ He paused and led us to a little kiosk or station on the edge of the bluff. “This,” he explained with pardonable pride, ‘is my radio-combinator. You see I have twelve numbers here on the keys— forward, back, start, stop propeller-motor, rudder right, rudder left, stop steering-mo- tor, light signals front, light signals rear, launch air-torpedoes—there is one of them over in the corner—and so on. “That instrument I call a telecommuta- tor. Then, too, I use what is called an aerial coherer relay.”’ He paused a moment to let the thing sink into our minds. I had long since given up and had joined Burke in silent wonder. Not so with Kennedy. His mind ran along, if anything, ahead of Sinclair; and now and then he asked a question which elicited an answer that showed that Sinclair appre- ciated talking to him about his hobby. “The idea,” went on Sinclair again, ‘‘is that of delayed contact. You understand, the machinery to propel and steer the aero- plane is always ready. But when the right impulse is given to it, it actually delays a few seconds. That is so that the direction given can be automatically repeated back tome. Then if it should prove to be wrong or undesirable I can change it—instantly— before it is too late.” We were intensely interested, even if we could not follow all the details. “Oh, there are many technicalities,’ he wenton. “But you can see for yourself that it really takes no great experience to run the air-ship. You could do it—any one with common sense could do it after I had showed him once what to do. It is all done by merely paying attention to the signals and depressing the right key here, of a limited number. “You see I have improved on all my pred- ecessors—on Wilson and Gardner in Eng- land, Roberts in Australia, Wirth and Lirpa in Germany, Gabet in France, and Tesla, Edison, Sims, and the younger Hammond in our own country.” 2 War Secret iv; “T should like to see a trial,’”’ suggested Kennedy. “T should be only too glad,” returned Sinclair. He depressed a lever. “Of course,” he observed, “‘you know that wireless power doesn’t operate the aeroplane. The wireless waves merely op- erate a system of relays. The air-ship car- ries its own power, just like any other—with the exception of the gyroscope, of course. I control that power, sitting here, just as if I were aboard the aeroplane.” As I went over quickly in my mind the points he had touched on in our talk, I felt that everything had been thought out most carefully. And when I reflected that it all could be controlled automatically, or, per- haps better, telautomatically, I felt simply astounded. Sinclair pointed again to the air-ship her- self. “You see,” he went on, ‘when she is working automatically, the wireless im- pulses are carried to a short aerial, like a mast, sticking up there just a little above the planes.”’ The mechanician threw in a switch. The motor caught on. ‘The air-ship hummed and trembled. The fumes of gasoline spread out through the air, stifling. We watched the inventor with tense in- terest. The mechanician retired and there was the air-ship, throbbing away, an inanimate thing, yet somehow now in my eyes endowed with life, with something akin to intelligence. Sinclair merely depressed:a key. THE aeroplane rose under tbe un- seen guidance of the wireless. Out | she streaked from the run-way and shot up, up, up, with the flag flapping proudly from the upper plane. She swayed from side to side as the mechanism which operated the stabilizing by means of the ends of the planes, counteracting the puffs of wind from the land, did its work with an intelligence almost superior to that of man ~ himself. Upward she soared. ‘““Now,” remarked Sinclair, flattered by the appreciative looks on our faces, “‘imag- ine that she is sailing along there, carrying death under her wings in the shape of my aerial torpedoes, or even plain ordinary bombs.” MICLOOOLK C©