Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 January 1911 — RIGS UP A WIRELESS PLANT [ARTICLE]

RIGS UP A WIRELESS PLANT

Blind Boy Living In New York Receives Messages From Distance of 800 Miles.

New York. —The handicap of blindness has failed to prevent john W. Ellis, a boy of 106- West Eighty-ninth street, from rigging up a wireless telegraph apparatus that makes it possible for him to hear the news of the world without leaving his room. As Ellis has been blind since his birth, it is a good deal easier to listen to what people say about things in general than It is to take the time to go over pages of raised and perforated lettering or have to ask friends to read aloud and let him know what is going on. V “I have not talked with many operators as yet as my cells do not generate enough power to make the waves I send long enough. I have listened, however, to messages from Norfolk, Washington and nearly all the other wireless stations frqm five to eight hundred miles away from New York. I receive the lfarcoul as well as the De Forrest systems.” '

Ellis is now nineteen years old. He graduated from the Perkins Institution for the Blind In Boston, and has been declared a prodigy, so far as comprehension of electrical and mechanical problems was concerned.