[5] He married Evelyn Bandy on June 28, 1897, and they had a son, Virgil Dewey Collins, who also became an author, sharing writing credits on some of his father's books.

Instead they transmitted information by telegraphy, the operator turned the transmitter off and on by tapping on a switch called a telegraph key to produce different length pulses of damped radio waves, to spell out text messages in Morse code.

By the last years of the century, many wireless researchers such as Reginald Fessenden, Ernst Ruhmer, William Dubilier, Quirino Majorana, and Valdemar Poulsen were working to develop continuous wave transmitters which could be modulated to carry sound, radiotelephony.

[10] Collins returned to doing his own research, investigating, in turn, wireless telephone systems that employed conduction, induction, and finally radio waves.

That same year he constructed two experimental stations at Rockland Lake, New York, separated by 1.5 kilometers (0.93 miles), that successfully established two-way communication.

In 1903, he made short-distance tests in the Hudson River in New York City, aboard the ferryboats John G. McCullough and Ridgewood,[13] and in July of that year predicted that "in a comparatively short space of time I am confident I shall telephone across the ocean".

[12] Collins' conduction and induction wireless telephone apparatus was similar to that employed by Alexander Graham Bell, Amos Dolbear and Nathan Stubblefield.

Bell's work never went beyond the demonstration stage, and Dolbear's patent, controlled by the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, was ruled by the U.S. courts be largely impractical.

[3] Despite Collins' initial optimism, he had no more success than the others in developing a commercial system using conduction or induction transmissions, due to the inherent limitations of these technologies.

In 1904, Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen[18] had introduced the arc-transmitter, which, unlike the intermittent pulses produced by spark transmitters, created steady signals that could be used for amplitude modulated (AM) audio transmissions.

Collins began making demonstration radiotelephone transmissions from his lab at 51 Clinton Street in Newark, New Jersey, that were sent to increasingly distant locations.

[5][26] After witnessing an October, 1908 demonstration at the New York Electrical Show, Guglielmo Marconi was quoted as saying: "Wireless telephony is an accomplished fact, and to Mr. Collins is due the credit of its invention...

"[27] In 1909, Collins claimed that his company had established four radiotelephone links operating simultaneously between Portland, Maine, and a nearby island, although there is little evidence that this was true.

A common company tactic was to set up a demonstration at a hotel in a targeted town, and, after successfully talking between two rooms using the short-range induction system, claim that a community-wide radiotelephone exchange had also been perfected, and would be installed pending financing by local stock sales.

[30] The indictment charges included overstating the scope of the company's patents, and also fraudulently claiming that its radiotelephone equipment had been perfected to the point that it was ready for widespread commercial deployment.

[33] However, he eventually re-established himself, and, appearing as himself in one of his juvenile novels, proclaimed that although he had suffered "hard falls" and was "stoop-shouldered" from "the weight of his own tragedies", he was persevering because he was "a bit battle scarred but my skin is as thick as that of a rhinoceros".

In the fiction arena, his three-part "Jack Heaton" adventure series reviewed its title character's exploits as a Wireless Operator (1919), Oil Prospector (1920) and Gold Seeker (1921).

Many of his books, such as The Boy Scientist, (1925) had comprehensive illustrations and few equations, with an emphasis on "hands-on" experimentation, at a level intended for high school students.

After discussing the "Einstein Theory," Collins tells his readers how to build a spectroscope, a radio receiver, and an x-ray machine for home experimentation.

[39] McNicols later expanded his remarks, writing: "amateur experimenters in wireless were at that early date provided with descriptive text enabling them to set up equipment for the duplication of experiments performed by the foremost workers.