dots of the Morse code, three flashes of the bluish sparks—­at that corresponding hour.  For six years he had been looking forward to and working for that moment—­the final test of all his effort and the beginning of a new triumph.  He sat waiting to hear three small sounds, the br-br-br of the Morse code “S,” humming on the diaphragm of his receiver—­the signature of the ether waves that had travelled two thousand miles to his listening ear.  As the hands of the clock, whose ticking alone broke the stillness of the room, reached thirty minutes past twelve, the receiver at the inventor’s ear began to hum, br-br-br, as distinctly as the sharp rap of a pencil on a table—­the unmistakable note of the ether vibrations sounded in the telephone receiver.  The telephone receiver was used instead of the usual recorder on account of its superior sensitiveness.

Transatlantic wireless telegraphy was an accomplished fact.

Though many doubted that an actual signal had been sent across the Atlantic, the scientists of both continents, almost without exception, accepted Marconi’s statement.  The sending of the transatlantic signal, the spanning of the wide ocean with translatable vibrations, was a great achievement, but the young Italian bore his honours modestly, and immediately went to work to perfect his system.

Two months after receiving the message from Poldhu at St. Johns, Marconi set sail from England for America, in the Philadelphia, to carry out, on a much larger scale, the experiments he had worked 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.