This then was the beginning of sending messages across the ocean without wires, or _cableless telegraphy_, as you call it, and I was in on it. CHAPTER VII--A GOVERNMENT OPERATOR AT ARLINGTON Nearly every one has the idea, or mania, or whatever you call it, of making some kind of a collection. It often begins to show itself early in a fellow’s life, and I’ve seen some old codgers in which it was still going strong at seventy. For instance, when I was only 10 or 12 years old I began to collect postage stamps; mother started to collect trading stamps as soon as they were invented; dad has a wonderful collection of old carbureters, which ill-fated motorists had thrown away, and Messrs. Carnegie and Rockefeller are still collecting the coin of the realm. The pet collections of the ladies of my home town consisted chiefly of souvenir spoons, china, pewter-ware and cut-glass while the men collected autographs and books, bugs and butterflies, antiques and paintings, fishing tackle and sporting guns. Then there was a sad-eyed young man whose parents were poor, but dishonest, who got a notion he would make a collection of all the solid silver water pitchers in and adjacent to Montclair, but the police made him to part with his novel collection and for the next five years he had ample time to collect his scattered wits. A few years after I had been with Mr. Marconi at St. Johns, when he received the first signals flashed across the Atlantic, his and other companies and various governments began to put up and to operate gigantic cableless stations. It came to me that it would be a nice thing to make a collection of all these big wireless plants. In thinking it over, though, I had to admit there were a couple of obstacles in the way which would make it a mighty hard proposition to carry through--and these were: (1) I couldn’t get them all in our back-yard in Montclair, and (2) I didn’t have the ready money to buy them. The next best plan, I pictured in my mind’s eye, would be to make a two foot scale model of each one of them and arrange them in a double row like the mummies in the Metropolitan Art Museum. As this scheme too, I figured, would take much time and money I compromised the matter by promising myself that I would visit each station in turn as they were put up and then in the end, I’d have a mental collection of them and this, at least, wouldn’t take up any room nor would it cost very much. After Marconi had received messages up to 1,551 miles and signals up to 2,099 miles at sea on a Morse register from his experimental station at Poldhu the future of cableless telegraphy was an assured fact.