It was on the 29th of September, 1915, that Carty conducted the demonstrations which thrilled the world and showed that wireless telephony was an accomplished fact.  Sitting in his office in New York, President Theodore Vail spoke into his desk telephone of the familiar type.  The wires carried his words to the towers of the Navy wireless station at Arlington, Virginia, where they were delivered to the sending apparatus of the wireless telephone.  Leaping into space, they traveled in every direction through the ether.  The antenna of the wireless station at Mare Island, California, caught part of the waves and they were amplified so that John Carty, sitting with his ear to the receiver, could hear the voice of his chief.  Carty and his associates had not only developed a system which made it possible to talk across the continent without wires, but they had made it possible to combine wire and wireless telegraphy.  He and Vail talked with each other freely and easily, while the naval officers who verified the tests marveled.

But even more wonderful things were to come.  Early in the morning of the next day other messages were sent from the Arlington tower, and these messages were heard by Lloyd Espenschied, one of Carty’s engineers, who was stationed at the wireless station at Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu, Hawaii.  The distance covered was nearly five thousand miles, and half of it was across land, which is the more remarkable as the wireless does not operate so readily over land as over water.  The distance covered in this test was greater than the distance from Washington to London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or Petrograd.  The successful completion of this test meant that the capitals of the great nations of the world might communicate, might talk with one another, by wireless telephone.  Only a receiving set had been installed at Hawaii, so that it was not possible for Espenschied to reply to the message from Arlington, and it was not until his message came by cable that those at Arlington knew that the words they had spoken had traveled five thousand miles.  Other receiving sets had been located at San Diego and at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, and at these points also the words were distinctly heard.

By the latter part of October all was in readiness for a transatlantic test, and on the 20th of October American engineers, with American apparatus installed at the great French station at the Eiffel Tower, Paris, heard the words spoken at Arlington, Virginia.  Carty and his engineers had bridged the Atlantic for the spoken word.  Because of war-time conditions it was not possible to secure the use of the French station for an extended test, but the fact was established that once the apparatus is in place telephonic communication between Europe and America may he carried on regularly.

The apparatus used as developed by the engineers of the Bell system was in a measure an outgrowth of their work with the long-distance telephone.  Wireless telephony, despite the wonders it has already accomplished, is still in its infancy.  With more perfect apparatus and the knowledge that comes with experience we may expect that speech will girdle the earth.