Via Wireless is a 1908 play dramatized by Paul Armstrong and Winchell Smith from an original story idea by Frederic Thompson, and incorporating one scene devised by Edwin Balmer and Irving W. Edwards.

The story concerns a Navy lieutenant who has designed a new marine artillery piece, the royalty owner of a rival gun who wants to sabotage it, and the girl who both men want.

Act I (Library in Home of George Durant, Pittsburgh) Marsh has designed a new marine artillery piece which he brings to Pinckney.

(Curtain) Act III (Scene 1:Courtyard of Hotel, San Juan, Puerto Rico, several weeks later.)

)[fn 1] On board the steamship Mongolian, wireless operator Harling has picked up a distress call from Durant's yacht.

Secret Service agent Bradley has discovered that Marsh really invented the gun Durant pays royalties on.

(Curtain) Producer Frederic Thompson first wrote the story in rough form around 1904, but let it sit until April 1908, when he started to revise it.

[1] Thompson turned both his story and the one-act play by Edwin Balmer and Irving W. Edwards over to Paul Armstrong and Winchell Smith, who created Via Wireless from them.

[11] President Roosevelt, his wife, and their daughter were in attendance, as was his secretary William Loeb Jr., and John E. Wilkie, head of the Secret Service.

[2] The Secret Service presence nearly disrupted the performance when producer Frederic Thompson got into an altercation with some agents just outside the theatre.

[12] President Roosevelt later made up for the contremps by inviting Thompson and his wife Mabel Taliaferro to the White House.

[13] The reviewer for The Baltimore Sun said the production brought into Washington four railcars full of material for scenic effects.

Their opinion was "while the plot is melodramatic, it is of the higher form of melodrama", and they noted the President was first to applaud an early line about West Point and Annapolis.

[2] Allen D. Albert of The Washington Times agreed it was melodrama, which he defined as "action, not thought", with "little appeal to the mind, and much to the emotions".

[15] Because Lillian Russell was still performing in Wildfire at the Liberty Theatre,[16] Via Wireless didn't premiere on Broadway until November 2, 1908.

[17] The reviewer for The Brooklyn Times said it was "the noisiest play on record", what with the steel foundry and storm at sea scenes, and yet the audience was even noisier, "a cheerful sign" for a melodrama.

[18] It was the critic for The New York Times who identified the "remarkable quality" of the wireless cabin scene: "...during the whole of its action the people you are most interested in are absent from view.

"[19] He goes on to predict Joseph Kaufman's wireless operator will continue to inspire "audiences to do their part", and further states "the acting throughout is unusually competent for this sort of thing".