Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

Record Details:

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,22 Radio Broadcast the New York Herald, for reporting the international yacht race between the Shamrock and Columbia. With such a background of practical experience as the young midshipman had. it is no wonder that some of his classmates have said that he was even then a "bug" on wireless. Actually, it may be imagined, he had some clear ideas on the future of radio before the Navy saw anything in it. It may even be that he Wad dreamed that it would sometime bind the remote places of the world together and reach clear across from Wrangel to Casablanca, from Colombo to Penang, from Zanzibar to Togoland and Heart's Content. At any rate, after being graduated on January 31, 1905, serving as midshipman on the Chicago, the destroyer Perry, the monitor Wyoming, and later on various ships as an ensign — still tinkering with radio apparatus at every opportunity — 1910 found him, a lieutenantcommander, back at the Academy as an instructor of electrical engineering, physics and chemistry, there to preach his favorite doctrine that there should be a navy man assigned as a radio officer with the Atlantic Fleet. So the Navy came right back at him and made him the first fleet radio officer, which work brought him down, not only through the incidental business of being present at the capture of Vera Cruz, but to the brewing and spilling of war in Europe. At this point, it is worth remembering that Naval officers are not usually, what any one would call effusive in public!}' describing one another. So it behooves one to read what Lieutenant-Commander C. N. Ingraham solemnly recorded in the Annals of nothing less than the proceedings of the United States Naval Institute: "The first fleet radio officer under whom I served, then Lieutenant-Commander S. C. Hooper, could operate faster and with a greater degree of accuracy than any man under him. He was the fleet radio officer in the days when, if ship operators were kept out of port unexpectedly, they might ask one of the shore operators, 'Say, old man, how is it to call Gertrude and say I can't get in to-day'; when Morse and Continental were mixed according to the desire of the sender, and when no regard was given to any form. By continual practice he learned to tell each vessel in the fleet by her spark, almost unerringly, and to distinguish, by certain peculiarities, the sending of each man under him. He was not the only competent officer in the fleet, hut in being one. and realizing its importance, IK was able to take the necessary steps to see that all radio officers be detailed for radio duty alone, and that they give to their work a certain number of hours each day including one watch. Though all of these did not take advantage of the opportunitv to become proficient operators, a certain percentage took enough interest in the work to master operating. I know that some of those who made good disliked the assignment at first as much as, or more than, those who did not make good, but later became interested through the determination to do their best in a imposition assigned. For it is interesting alter the long and tedious practice necessary to acquire proficiency is finished. It is as much a real game as auction bridge, and requires infinitely more finesse. "When this officer left the fleet, Inhad brought it to the highest state of efficiency possible at that time with the apparatus -provided. Fvery operator in the fleet wanted, above all else, to 'burn up' the fleet radio officer, and at the same time send ' good stuff. ' They could not do this, but they kept trying. Each operator hated to be obliged to ask for a repetition of any part of a message because* the fleet radio officer never did. Mr. Hooper would tell them he had transmitted so many miles, or had received such and such a distance with a stated apparatus, and they would endeavor to beat that record. At one time, in Yera Crux, at a conference. he said he had copied a message from N'.iuen, Germany, where a new spark station had just been installed. One operator, I know, sat up all night the following night with a radio room completely shut up — not even a fan going, for fear of induction-and copied a complete message from the same station,^ on a crystal detector where the lleet radio officer had used an audion. You may say that such things as this officer was able to do are not possible with the fleet at its present proportions. No, not as a whole, but distinctly YFS, if all forces, squadrons, and divisions, had officers well versed in operating and in procedure." Next, the Navy sent Commander Hooper abroad as an observer, with " a receiving set in his pocket." to listen in on radio abroad and learn whether the European countries were using new and better methods than those used by the Navy. Thus he listened in and heard the Germans entering Brussels, at the very outset of the war. After that duty, the Commander reported back to the Department in Washington to take part in the first thorough reorganization of the Navy's radio. After this, from 191 5 to 1917, he served as the head of the Radio Division in the