After the New Jersey sinking, Sparks was on another steamer, Olinda, hauling sugar from Cuba to refineries on the Hudson River. Jay was six feet tall, and the wireless shack so minuscule he had to stick his feet out a porthole to stretch out on the cot.
Olinda chugged north, hitting a violent storm off North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras. This is an extremely dodgy place to run into “dirty weather.” More than 600 ships have gone down. Particularly treacherous are the Diamond Shoals, an area of constantly shifting undersea sand ridges.
In Quinby’s time, a constant problem in rough seas was that when a ship’s propeller stuck out in the air in rough seas, the steam engine would race out of control. The ship’s engineer had to power down quick.
An especially violent wave smacked into Olinda and sent her chief officer sprawling. The RPMs surged, and the ship’s wheel on the bridge sheared off! Adding to woes, one of Olinda’s anchors came loose.
Uh-oh.
L, Sir Richard Grenville, who led the first European expedition to North America to lose a ship at Cape Hatteras, in June 1585. Right, the most famous sinking was probably the USS Monitor, which went down with the loss of sixteen lives in 1862 during the US Civil War. The ship had famously fought CSS Virginia (formerly Merrimack) at Hampton Roads, Virginia, earlier that year. It was the world’s first battle between two iron-clad ships.
Panicked, Captain Garcia zipped up to Jay’s cabin. They really, reeeeally needed a seagoing tug, and Garcia told Quinby to radio for one. Issue: the cabin’s motor-generator, which supplied the necessary alternating current (AC) had been smashed apart by seawater.
If this radio guy didn’t have a degree in electrical engineering, Olinda would likely have been just another shipwreck on a long list. Quinby wracked his brain, his focus improved by not wanting to turn into Tender Vittles for the crabs on the Atlantic ocean floor. He stared at his direct current (DC) electric fan, and transformed into a nonfiction McGyver:
I suddenly recalled the vibrating interrupter of the 10” spark coil aboard New Jersey, which clattered back and forth to produce pulsating direct current. Olinda’s transformer was indeed an oversized spark coil. It should work on pulsating DC, and the fan could produce that! Hurriedly I opened the toolbox and rigged a piece of bare copper wire to scrape against the brass blades of the fan, I wired this this rig up in a series with the telegraph key and the ship’s DC current supply and substituted that input for the AC input to the transformer.
[Following closely, non-engineers?]
Then I started up the fan and tried out the key. It worked! Of course, the resultant combination of pyrotechnics, the ringing clatter of the fan blades, and the molten globules of copper and brass that spattered around the room produced quite a disturbance. This brought the chief engineer to the door as I was sending the SOS and our position report. He viewed with alarm what appeared to be a madman conducting a maniacal experiment. “Come out of there, Sparks,” he pleaded, “you’re gonna burn yourself up.”
The wireless operator on duty at Cape Hatteras got the message. A jumbo-sized tugboat pulled Olinda in to a shipyard, where it got a new wheel and tail shaft, and continued on up to the Big Apple.
Quinby’s alma mater, New York City College, has produced ten Nobel Prize winners. It was also an excellent place for a young undergrad to develop his poker skills.
