Verdana

New York Times 100 years ago today, February 6, 1913:

Contracts Let for Most Powerful Wireless Stations Yet Attempted.

BY WAY OF OAHU TO JAPAN

New Plants on Atlantic Coast Will Increase Speed to Europe — A Circle of the Globe.

    In a plan to span the Pacific Ocean for the first time by wireless and to increase the service between New York and London it was announced yesterday that a contract for eight wireless telegraph stations, the most powerful in the world, has just been awarded by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company to the J. G. White Engineering Corporation, contractors of this city. The stations will be located in pairs, a receiving and a sending station, thirty miles apart, so that the incoming and outgoing messages will not interfere with one another. The stations are to be placed at Oahu, in the Sandwich Islands; Tamales Bay and Bolinas, Cal.; near Belmar, N.J., and one in Eastern Massachusetts at a point to be definitely selected later.
    These stations, it was said, would form part of a globe-girdling system which will continue to the East by way of Japan, so as not to interfere with the United States Government wireless station at Manila; and thence ultimately to India, connecting the West with European stations. These stations, it was said, will not only permit the transmission of messages across the Pacific, but will greatly increase the capacity and speed of the service between New York and London. They will have the longest range and the highest power of any wireless stations ever built. This range, it was estimated, would vary from 4,000 to 6,000 miles for each station. The stations must be attuned each to a different note to keep from interfering with each other and with existing stations. The Japanese Government, from which the company has received permission to locate a subsequent wireless station at some point on the coast of Japan to be selected later, had the first choice of notes for this system, and the new stations had to choose notes not pre-empted by the United States Government. Each station will sing its own note and be recognizable thereby.
    The poles for the stations will be the tallest wireless poles ever known. They will be 400 feet high, and in some instances may go up to 430 feet, as high as the Palisades. There will be twelve poles at each station arranged in a great semicircle covering a square mile.
    The method of erecting the poles is unique. They will be sectional, constructed without scaffolding, and bolted together in ten-foot lengths. The basket from which the work is done is hoisted above the open end of the ten-foot lengths on an inner pole which is raised by means of a heel rope.
    The antennae with which these wireless stations will feel the waves that are coming aggregate 82 miles in length, and the "grounding" requires 40 miles of underground, or plowed-in wires.
    The power plant of these stations is arranged to give a thousand horse-power spark. All of the vast receiving stations will be 30 miles away at right angles from the line on which the sending stations are designed to send so as to avoid the etheric disturbances caused by them. They will be best able to gather up from the atmosphere enough of the attenuated incoming wireless from distant stations to make a faint buzz on a telephone receiver, to make which probably requires less energy than that necessary to actuate any other known physical instrument.
    The plans of the Marconi Company, it was said, include stations to be built by the British Marconi Company in Africa, Europe, and Asia, and stations to be erected in Japan and South America. A tentative scheme of such a girdle around the world was outlined as follows: From San Francisco to Oahu; from Oahu to the east coast of Japan; from Japan to Singapore; Singapore to Bangalore; Bangalore to Aden; Aden to Cairo; Cairo to London; London to Clifden, Ireland; Clifden to Glace Bay; Glace Bay to New York; New York to Panama; Panama to Bolinas, Cal.
    The approximate cost of carrying out the projected wireless bridge across the Pacific could not be learned yesterday. It was said, however that the engineering work on the eight new stations had already been started and that engineering forces would shortly be sent to the field. The contract is one of the first of the J. G. White Engineering Corporation. The work on the new stations, it was estimated, would be completed and the stations put into operation in the Fall of the year.