They definitely wouldn't but then they weren't very user
friendly, in general.

	The big guns put the spark inside some sort of chamber
away from the air. The chamber was full of alcohol vapor or
maybe even hydrogen and you hoped to God there wasn't a little
hole somewhere for oxygen to get in as that was a fantastic
design for a bomb.

	I think I read in "QST" that the folks to ran those
types of spark stations frequently got blasted with jets of
flame when the contents of the chamber blew up in their faces.

	I don't know as much as I would like to know about those
old spark stations.

	Also, the spark gap on the larger stations was a
rotating wheel with spokes in it as one of the contacts. The
idea was that this distributed the high heat around the spinning
wheel. It also gave the signal a tone whose pitch varied with
the speed of rotation.

	Another neat idea whose time thankfully came and went a
very long time ago was the radio frequency steam generator that
Fessendon successfully used to send first human voice
transmission around 1906. This was just a spinning generator
that spun fast enough and had enough pole pieces to generate RF
around 100 KHZ.

	They had actually tried to voice-modulate a spark gap
before that time and the fidelity was, shall we say, lacking in
clarity.

	The steam-powered generator that Regenold Fessendon used
was doing things the hard way all right, but there were no tubes
yet and no way to generate an RF carrier directly except via
dynamo.

	Ah, the good old days. Not really that good but very
old.

WB5AGZ
"Howard, W A 9 Y B W" writes:
> Gerry,
> 
> Those old spark-gap type transmitters wouldn't be very blind friendly hi,
> hi!!