All through the wonders he has brought about, Marconi, the boy and the man, has shown but little—­he is the strong character that does things and says little, and his works speak so amazingly, so loudly, that the personality of the man is obscured.

The Marconi station at Glace Bay, Cape Breton, is now receiving messages for cableless transmission to England at the rate of ten cents a word—­newspaper matter at five cents a word.  Transatlantic wireless telegraphy is an everyday occurrence, and the common practical uses are almost beyond mention.  It is quite within the bounds of possibility for England to talk clear across to Australia over the Isthmus of Panama, and soon France will be actually holding converse with her strange ally, Russia, across Germany and Austria, without asking the permission of either country.  Ships talk to one another while in mid-ocean, separated by miles of salt water.  Newspapers have been published aboard transatlantic steamers with the latest news telegraphed while en route; indeed, a regular news service of this kind, at a very reasonable rate, has been established.  These are facts; what wonders the future has in store we can only guess.  But these are some of the possibilities—­news service supplied to subscribers at their homes, the important items to be ticked off on each private instrument automatically, “Marconigraphed” from the editorial rooms; the sending and receiving of messages from moving trains or any other kind of a conveyance; the direction of a submarine craft from a safe-distance point, or the control of a submarine torpedo.

One is apt to grow dizzy if the imagination is allowed to run on too far—­but why should not one friend talk to another though he be miles away, and to him alone, since his portable instrument is attuned to but one kind of vibration.  It will be like having a separate language for each person, so that “friend communeth with friend, and a stranger intermeddleth not—­” and which none but that one person can understand.

SANTOS-DUMONT AND HIS AIR-SHIP

There was a boy in far-away Brazil who played with his friends the game of “Pigeon Flies.”

In this pastime the boy who is “it” calls out “pigeon flies,” or “bat flies,” and the others raise their fingers; but if he should call “fox flies,” and one of his mates should raise his hand, that boy would have to pay a forfeit.

The Brazilian boy, however, insisted on raising his finger when the catchwords “man flies” were called, and firmly protested against paying a forfeit.

Alberto Santos-Dumont, even in those early days, was sure that if man did not fly then he would some day.

Many an imaginative boy with a mechanical turn of mind has dreamed and planned wonderful machines that would carry him triumphantly over the tree-tops, and when the tug of the kite-string has been felt has wished that it would pull him up in the air and carry him soaring among the clouds.  Santos-Dumont was just such a boy, and he spent much time in setting miniature balloons afloat, and in launching tiny air-ships actuated by twisted rubber bands.  But he never outgrew this interest in overhead sailing, and his dreams turned into practical working inventions that enabled him to do what never a mortal man had done before—­that is, move about at will in the air.