My first exposure to wireless, as this form of communication was called in those days, was in 1907 when I happened to glance through a copy of a magazine called Electrical World, which I found on my father’s desk. I read about this new method of communication that was becoming more and more popular here and abroad.

The necessary equipment, fortunately, was simple as compared to that used today, so that a boy who was mechanically minded and interested in electrical matters could put together a workable apparatus.

I interested my father in the possibilities of this thing called wireless and, with his help, acquired a few parts. Some of them came from his shop and some were made at home. I made a wireless receiver and was able to tune in on the air, hoping to hear someone talking—in dots and dashes, of course—thousands of miles away. That was my hope anyway, but it was many months before it was realized.

My first apparatus was a receiver using the coherer as a detector of radio waves. My coherer was a piece of glass tubing such as is found on steam boilers to show the height of water. A small section of the inside of that tubing was filled with nickel and iron filings. The nickel came from a five cent piece; iron filings were obtained the hard way, by the use of a file on soft iron. A metal plug put in at each end led the current in and brought the signal out.

Alongside this glass tube, which was suspended horizontally, was an ordinary doorbell with the clapper so placed that when a radio signal came in and made the filings cohere, the clapper hit the side of the glass tube and loosened the filings, to prepare for the next signal.

The tuner was constructed, as all amateur tuners were in those days, from an oatmeal box wound with whatever wire was available. As many as 150 turns of wire were wound on the cylindrical form. Then the insulation was scraped off in a narrow path across all the turns, thus exposing the bare wires. A spring slider was then arranged so that it could be moved along the exposed turns to bring into the circuit as many turns as would be needed to tune to a particular station.

Finally I had a pair of earphones through which to hear the signals that the coherer picked up. The earphones in those days were usually not available to an amateur unless his family was well-to-do. For that reason I, like many others, was likely to “borrow” a single phone from an ordinary telephone wall box. It was an awkward accessory, but effective to a degree.

One of the interesting events, as I remember it now, occurred on a morning soon after I put this combination of rough odds and ends together. It was my practice to tune in right after breakfast. This