Until lately, the investigators trying to study the hurricane in motion across the earth were as handicapped as if they had been stricken blind and dumb when its great cloud shield enveloped them. The darkening scud and rain shut off all view of the upper regions by day and left them in utter darkness by night. No word came from ships caught in its inward tentacles until long afterward, when the survivors had come into port. Balloons tracing its winds disappeared in the clouds and were carried away. A method of following them above the clouds would have helped in the understanding of the upper regions in the same way that reports from sailing ships had helped in the study of the surface winds. This was the situation at the end of the Spanish War. But a new era was opening. As the century came to a close, Marconi was getting ready to span the far reaches of the Atlantic with his wireless apparatus. Already the miracle of the telephone carrying the human voice by wire had become a practical reality, with more than a million subscribers in the United States, but it was not destined to be used across the ocean for many years. Even that accomplishment would not have afforded much help to the storm hunters. They had tried transoceanic messages for weather reporting when submarine cables were laid across the Atlantic. Some weathermen thought at first that it would be possible to pick up reports of storms on the American Coast and, allowing a certain number of days for them to cross the Atlantic, to predict their arrival in Europe. This failed to work, for many storms die or merge with others en route, and so many new disturbances are born in mid-Atlantic that it is necessary to have reports every day from all parts of the ocean to tell when storms are likely to approach European shores. In 1900, Marconi was building a long distance transmitting station in England, and readable signals had been sent over a span of two hundred miles. No one then could foresee the strange roles that this remarkable invention would play in storm hunting but it was obvious that messages could be sent across long distances between ships at sea and from ship to shore. Already wireless had been used successfully between British war vessels on maneuvers. Actually, it was destined to be a powerful ally of the men who searched for hurricanes and reported their progress, but eventually this trend reversed itself and radio was the cause of tropical storms being found and then lost again in critical circumstances.