"I had acquired a small square of bakelite and I used a penknife to make a holder for the valve, twisting a few turns of wire round the pins as I could find nothing to use as a socket.I had no idea how to connect the various items I made or bought.I had seen a circuit diagram in a French magazine of a detector with reaction.I made the connections by twisting wires together and finally the receiver was complete.The next thing was the aerial.I made an enormous aerial with four parallel wires, like the aerials I had seen on ships.Putting it up was a dangerous operation as our house had a rather steep tiled roof, so I got some friends to help me.Some of them who had 'superior knowledge' told me the down-lead must have no bends.I got hold of a stiff copper wire and supported the down-lead on two enormous bell insulators as used on telegraph poles.I had to smash a corner of my bedroom window to bring the wire in.I had bought a large knife switch which could be turned over to connect the aerial to ground.I was afraid the large flat top of the aerial would attract thunderbolts.When I finally connected the aerial to the receiver I heard ABSOLUTELY NOTHING."I asked him how he tuned the receiver.He said he had put many taps on the coil and he twisted his antenna to these taps trying various combinations with the tuning capacitor.
"All I heard was this breathing noise.I learned later that it was the 'carrier wave' of a broadcasting station without modulation, but I didn't know what that meant.As my friends also heard the same noise I was convinced my receiver was working.We soon found out that the longwave transmitter at Ankara, the capital of Turkey was making test transmissions without modulation.Ankara was one of the first broadcasting stations in that part of the world."Norman: "Regeneration should have produced a whistle."Takis: "Yes, indeed.And in a peculiar way.When I approached the receiver my hand produced the whistle."Norman: "Hand capacity effect."
Takis: "And foot capacity effect as well! When I approached my knee to the metal leg of the work-bench I would lose the station I had been listening to." He said the tuning capacitor he had made was obviously too small and he had to alter the taps on the coil continuously.About three o'clock in the morning during a cold winter night he heard a new sound - the breathing (carrier) noise and a sort of regular ticking.He later found out that it was the new broadcasting station in Vienna, Austria, which transmitted the sound of a metronome throughout the night.This would have been about 1926.
I asked Takis about school."In spite of the late nights listening I never missed a day at school.My father was the Chairman of the School Committee and I couldn't let him down.But I had to earn some pocket money to pay for the bits a pieces I needed.Particularly a decent pair of headphones; I had to hold the army headphone to me ear with one hand which gave me pins and needles.For some years I had kept goldfish and pigeons, so I sold them.A friend of mine had gone to sea as a cadet and his ship went abroad, so I asked him to get me a pair of headphones.
"I must explain to you that it was no easy matter for a Russian seaman to serve on a vessel which visited foreign ports.First one had to go through the Communist Party sieve and then he was told that if he jumped ship his family would suffer for it.
"Anyway, he bought me a lovely pair of Telefunken headphones when the ship berthed at Constantinople (Istanbul) which I have to this day.But not on his first trip, when he was not allowed to go ashore.And it was not the captain who decided who could go ashore.A trusted member of the Party would pick out a group of seamen who could land but they had to stay together the whole time.
"I never managed to go abroad.At the Club I had obtained a morse test certificate for 40 letters a minute (8 wpm) in Latin characters and 90 letters (18 wpm) in the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian).To go abroad one had to up-grade to 80 Latin and 120 Cyrillic letters.(16 & 24 wpm).I was put on a small coastal ice-breaker which cleared the river estuaries in the Black Sea.
"The Black Sea is one of the most treacherous inland seas in the world.During the winter its northern shores are frozen whereas the coast of Asia Minor keeps the southern shores relatively warm by comparison.This results in gale force winds and rough seas.Waves follow each other very closely as opposed to the long swell one gets in the Pacific.Ships have to leave port to avoid crashing into each other.
"I was about 18 when I first went to sea as a cadet W/T operator.One day when we came out of an estuary the sea was so rough that the captain decided to turn back.As we turned to starboard we noticed an American freighter behind us heavily laden with wheat and very low down in the water.To our horror it was caught between the crests of two enormous waves and broke in two roughly amidships.Although we were only about half a mile away the freighter sank before we could get to it.We saw a few survivors in the water, but it would have been impossible to put a boat into that treacherous sea.Apart from which a man cannot survive many minutes in a water temperature just above freezing.It was all over in a flash and we returned to Odessa in deep shock.
"Odessa used to have four harbours.The callsign of the W/T station was EU5KAO.I remember it very well because it was my job to take the weather forecasts for shipping which it transmitted regularly."Takis spoke about some amusing misconceptions of that period.When he first completed his receiver and was getting poor results with it he asked a more experienced amateur to look at it.The 'expert' immediately found the first fault: the downlead from the antenna had a bend in it of more than 45 degrees which was quite unacceptable.Secondly, the ground connection to the central heating radiator was no good because it was winter and the radiator was hot so it presented a very high resistance! It must be soldered, he said, to a cold water tap.
