or commercial stations. It also provides for the
licensing of amateurs who prove competent.

The stations owned and operated by boys have already proved of great
use. In times of storm and flood when wire communication failed they
have proved the only means of communicating with many districts. In
time of war these amateur stations, scattered in all parts of the
country, might prove immensely valuable. Means have now been taken to
so organize the amateurs that they can communicate with one another,
and by this means messages may be sent to any part of the country.

One young American, John Hays Hammond, Jr., has applied the wireless
in novel and interesting ways. By means of special apparatus mounted
on a small boat he can by the means of a wireless station on shore
start or stop the vessel, or steer it in any direction by his wireless
control. He has applied the same system to the control of torpedoes.
By this means a torpedo may be controlled after it has left the shore
and may be directed in any direction as long as it is within sight.
This invention may prove of incalculable benefit should America be
attacked by a foreign power.

What startling developments of wireless telegraphy lie still in the
future we do not know. Marconi has predicted that wireless messages
will circle the globe. "I believe," he has said, "that in the near
future a wireless message will be sent from New York completely around
the world without relaying, and will be received by an instrument
in the same office with the transmitter, in perhaps less time than
Shakespeare's forty minutes."

Not long ago the United States battle-ship _Wyoming_, lying off Cape
Henry on the Atlantic coast, communicated with the _San Diego_ at
Guaymas, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. This distance, twenty-five
hundred miles across land, shows that Marconi's prediction may be
realized in the not distant future.

XIX

SPEAKING ACROSS THE CONTINENT

A New "Hello Boy" in Boston--Why the Boy Sought the Job--The Useful
Things the Boy Found to Do--Young Carty and the Multiple
Switchboard--Called to New York City--He Quiets the Roaring
Wires--Carty Made Engineer-in-Chief--Extending the Range of the
Human Voice--New York Talks to San Francisco Over a Wire.

It seemed to many that the wireless telegraph was to be the final word
in the development of communication, but two striking achievements
coming in 1915 proved this to be far from the c