Did not read the original articles, but it's interesting that he used telephone dialing equipment for his control system.
Easy enough to hook an old fashioned rotary pulse dialer to a transmitter... just plug it into the Morse code jack on a transmitter. Dial a 4, and the transmitter sends out four quick pulses, just as if you used a Morse code key to send an H : dot-dot-dot-dot.
On the ship, he probably used telephone exchange stepping relays connected to the receiver which would kick over to the fourth position and cause, say, gun #4 to fire:
http://www.technology.niagarac.on.ca/people/mcsele/images/telephoneImages/UniSteppingRelay.jpgOr, for more complex control, the first set of pulses could set other receiving stepper relays to prepare for a category of commands, like 3 pulses to set up for steering, 4 pulses for speed control, etc. Then the next set of pulses would say what to do, like steer left or speed up, or whatever.
It's amazing what the telephone companies could do in terms of directing calls just with relay pulses. (But what a Truth Table!)
Just noodling out how he might have done it --but could not read the actual article.
I'm not clear on how he got killed --whether it was by one of the ship's guns or a handgun he was working on.
Could have been a case of "Boy, did I get a wrong number!" and "Always keep your battleship pointed in a safe direction."
Terry
Side note on early R/C stuff as I recall it:
I never got into it myself, but my brother built an R/C plane according to the R/C technology of the time (ca. mid-late 40s). The rudder-only control system was an escapement mechanism powered by a wound-up rubber band. Each pulse received would kick the rudder over a step at a time: One pulse, left, next pulse back to neutral, next pulse right rudder, last pulse back to neutral or something like that.
So from a neutral straight-ahead flight, to make a right turn, you sent three pulses: left, back to neutral, then right. Then a single pulse to return to rudder-neutral. I never saw him fly it, but the description was that the planes necessarily "wobbled" in controlling the flight direction since you had to go through the proper number of pulses to control it. Just all as I recall it.
