"Sure it is and needs no fake booming, but I like to see a little brains mixed with it. There was a fellow named Furlong--I ran across him first in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where our battle-fleet was rondayvouing for winter drill. I had a month's pay on a fight coming off in London and was wishing I knew how it came out without waiting a week or ten days for the New York papers, when Faulkner, the captain's yeoman, says: 'Why don't you ask Furlong, the wireless operator? He'll find out for you.' "But how can he?" says I. "You people in the deck division," says Faulkner, "you're living in the past. You fellows want to come out of your sailin'-ship dreams and steam around and see what's doin' in the world. Furlong'll pick it off from the Cape Cod station when they're gettin' it from across for the newspapers." "From here--from off the ship?" I asks. "Why, I thought the record for picking up or sending from a ship was six or seven hundred miles." "Maybe it is," says Faulkner, "but Furlong's specialty is breaking records." So I step up to the wireless shack to see Furlong. Regan, the chief signal quartermaster, was there before me. Regan had a girl in Brooklyn, and Furlong was getting off Regan's regular evening message to her about how he was still in good health and still hoped to be back in the spring and so on by wireless to a station up near New York in charge of a friend of Furlong's, whose job was to pass it on to a telegraph-office in Brooklyn just across the street from where the girl lived. She would have it for breakfast in the morning, and Regan would have her answer to it some time during the day. A consolation to two loving hearts it was, and they doing it all winter without it costing either of them a copper. I tell Furlong what I'm after. "Sure," he says, and begins to make the colored lights hop. "And have a cigarette while you're waiting," he says, "for it will take a few minutes." I looked around for a match. "Here," says Furlong, and spills a little alcohol from a bottle onto a copper-looking switch thing and brings down on that another copper-looking switch thing with a handle--both of 'em sticking out from the bulkhead--and out flows a blue flame six inches long and I light my cigarette, watching out not to burn the end of my nose while I'm lighting it. He had the place full of little gadgets like that. While we sat there he gives out all the latest news as fast as he grabs it off, not only about my fight in London, but how the ponies were running in New Orleans, what Congress was killing time about, which particular European country was going to war now--all the important news.