"It Is in the Air."
The wireless operator of the Panama railroad steamer Advance, while off the coast of New Jersey, received the following message: "Magazine of the battleship Louisiana exploded off Rio. All on board lost." After a short time another message was picked up, correcting the first by saying that the boilers and not the magazine had exploded. It was not till the Advance reached New York that its passengers discovered that the messages were merely jokes. Some "smart" amateur had sent out the messages from his private experiment station, and was chuckling to himself over the dismay he was causing.
That sort of thing was summarily stopped during the Great War. It is too easy to set up wireless telegraph stations. These private experimenters got in the way of the operators that have actual messages to send. Their electrical impulses made hash of the messages that have a right to the air because they are real messages and not jests or frauds.
Of course it goes hard with men to learn that the air is not open to them all around the earth, and yet it must not be free to them. No man is permitted to run over another's land, or to fire a bullet over it, either; no more will he be permitted to fire electrical darts through the air that does not belong to him.
All of which has set me to thinking about a different sort of wireless telegraphy—a sort that is as old as the other is new, and as familiar as the other is strange.
"It is in the air," we say of an idea or a belief or an opinion which has taken men's fancy and captured men's minds.
Perhaps it is an unfavorable judgment concerning someone. Perhaps it is a sense of coming disaster in the business world. Perhaps it is an eagerness for a political change. "It is in the air," we say of any of these matters, thinking that this is a sufficient explanation of it.
No, this is not a sufficient explanation of it. We ought to find out how it got into the air. Did it originate from some trifler's wireless telegraph station? Was it born as an irresponsible joke or a baseless sarcasm or sneer? Is it empty and unsubstantial as the air in which it is? Surely these are questions very proper to ask.
Let an opinion be ever so much "in the air," it has no right to a place in our heads or our hearts unless it is also in truth and in love.