d out with the tug
three years ago. The steamship was fitted with a complete receiving and
sending outfit, and soon after she steamed out from the harbor she began
to talk to the Cornwall station in the dot-and-dash sign language. The
long-distance talk between ship and shore continued at intervals, the
recording instrument writing the messages down so that any one who
understood the Morse code could read. Message after message came and
went until one hundred and fifty miles of sea lay between Marconi and
his station. Then the ship could talk no more, her sending apparatus not
being strong enough; but the faithful men at Poldhu kept sending
messages to their chief, and the recorder on the _Philadelphia_ kept
taking them down in the telegrapher's shorthand, though the steamship
was plowing westward at twenty miles an hour. Day after day, at the
appointed hour to the very second, the messages came from the station on
land, flung into the air with the speed of light, to the young man in
the deck cabin of a speeding steamship two hundred and fifty, five
hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred, yes, two thousand and ninety-nine
miles away--messages that were written down automatically as they came,
being permanent records that none might gainsay and that all might
observe.

To Marconi it was the simple carrying out of his orders, for he said
that he had fitted the Poldhu instruments to work to two thousand one
hundred miles, but to those who saw the thing done--saw the narrow
strips of paper come reeling off the recorder, stamped with the blue
impressions of the messages through the air, it was astounding almost
beyond belief; but there was the record, duly attested by those who
knew, and clearly marked with the position of the ship in longitude and
latitude at the time they were received.

It was only a few months afterward that Marconi, from his first station
in the United States, at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass., sent a message
direct to Poldhu, three thousand miles. At frequent intervals messages
go from one country to the other across the ocean, carried through fog,
unaffected by the winds, and following the curvature of the earth,
without the aid of wires.

Again the unassuming nature of the young Italian was shown. There was
no brass band nor display of national colours in honour of the great
achievement; it was all accomplished quietly, and suddenly the world
woke up to find that the thing had been done. Then the great