Her route was between New York and Liverpool. Built by Harlan and Wolff
of Belfast, Ireland, she was launched in 1901 and fitted for the
transatlantic service in 1902. She was over 600 feet long, her breadth
was nearly 70 feet and her depth was 40 feet. Talk about a ship, boy,
the _Andalusian_ was as far ahead of the _Carlos Madino_ as that ship
was ahead of a lifeboat.
The aerial of the _Andalusian_ was formed of two wires 375 feet long and
suspended between her top-gallant masts 200 feet above the sea and were
held apart by two 8-foot spreaders. She was one of the first ships to be
fitted with wireless and her wireless room was a specially built room on
the port side of the forward saloon deck.
Although the apparatus was of the old Marconi type, having been
installed when the ship was built, we could send from 300 to 400 miles
with it and receive four times that distance. The transmitter was formed
of two 10 inch induction coils the primaries of which were connected in
series and the secondaries in parallel so that while the length of the
spark was still 10 inches it was twice as fat and hence proportionately
more powerful.
There was a _jigger_, as Marconi called his tuning coil, and a battery
of 18 Leyden jars made up the condenser for tuning the sending circuits.
It was also fitted with a new kind of a key invented by Sammis who was
at that time the chief engineer of the _Marconi Company of America_.
He called it a _changeover switch_ but it was really a key and an aerial
switch combined. In order to connect the receiver with the aerial all
you had to do was to turn the key, which was on a pivot, to the right.
When the key was turned it also cut off the current from the 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 operating 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 sensitive as a crystal detector when you found a sensitive
spot on the latter, still there were no adjustments to be constantly
made as with the former.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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