For over a century, a ‘fact’ has dominated
communications history but now doubts have weakened its veracity and we ask, is
any part of this historical story actually true? Has the wrong location and
country undeservedly received credit? It’s now time to address and correct these
inaccuracies.
The Fact: On December 11th 1901, Marconi
received the first trans-Atlantic wireless message when the Morse code ‘S’ was
sent from Poldhu in Cornwall to St. John’s Newfoundland.’
This is the commonly recognized fact in most
textbooks but is there any truth to it and more importantly was that message
really sent from Poldhu or has the Cornish town falsely claimed the heritage to
this event for over one hundred years?
The first question one needs to ask, is this. If
you were to travel across the Atlantic and you were unsure of the range of the
craft in which you were travelling as it had never completed the journey before,
would you want to travel 3,425km or 3,164Km? At almost 300km closer, the
shorter distance would provide the greatest opportunity for success. That distance
is a vital number in this story as the perceived truth unravels.
The Background
The desire to span the Atlantic by means of communications
gathered pace from the mid-19th century. With the invention of the telegraph,
attempts to lay an undersea cable connecting Europe and America began in the
1850’s. The first successful messages dispatched across the ocean were in 1858
from a telegraph office in Valentia, County Kerry to Trinity Bay, Nova Scotia.
The cable failed within weeks. Eventually finances were raised and the job was
completed in 1865 and 1866 but the cables were susceptible to bad weather,
damage, salt water and breakages which were often very expensive to locate and
repair. For the main ‘Anglo-American Telegraph Company’, messaging across the
Atlantic was a lucrative business as trade and global commerce increased
rapidly.
Marconi Invents and Disrupts the status quo.
Guglielmo Marconi was born in Bologna Italy in 1874. His
parents were an Italian merchant Guiseppe, who married for a second time,
following the death of his first wife, to Irish woman Annie Jameson, a member
of the famous whiskey distilling family. Marconi began his first experiments in
wireless telegraphy in his native Italy. His Irish mother encouraged the young
inventor, who was gathering ideas and information from many pioneers attempting
to harness the ether, to go to London. In London he was introduced to William
Preece, the chief engineer with the GPO. He saw huge advantage in wireless
communications and helped the young Italian demonstrate the ability and power
of the new medium.
While Marconi was the engineer, his cousin Henry Jameson
Davis saw huge financial prospects in the success of the wireless telegraphy.
In 1897, the formed the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company to raise finance to
protect Marconi’s patents and generate commercial possibilities for radio. Marconi
was a publicist in an era prior to Google searches and social media. He and
Jameson Davis were known to exaggerate or even falsify successes with
experiments to gain press attention and the interest of potential financial
backers.
Marconi needed to keep the British post office and UK
Government on his side to allow him to continue with the experiments and to
gain access to lucrative contacts and contracts. The British began to see huge
potential in wireless communications to maintain their grip on the Empire and
it’s position as the dominant nation on the planet. In 1898 following a
successful demonstration of radio to deliver sports journalism and news at Dun
Laoghaire (Kingstown Regatta), wireless telegraphy was demonstrated to the King
at the regatta in Cowes shortly after.
The Building of Poldhu & connecting it with Ireland
During
the next four months much work was done in modifying and perfecting the
wave-generating arrangements, and numerous telegraphic tests were conducted
during the period by Mr. Marconi between Poldhu in Cornwall, Crookhaven, in the
South of Ireland, and also with Niton in the Isle of Wight. A delay occurred
owing to a storm on September -18, 1901, which wrecked a number of masts, but
sufficient restoration of the aerial was made by the end of November, 1901, to
enable him to contemplate making an experiment across the Atlantic. He left
England on November 27, 1901, in the steamship ‘Sardinian’ for Newfoundland,
having with him two assistants, Messrs. Kemp and Paget, and also a number of
balloons and kites. He arrived at St. John's, Newfoundland, about December 5th.
(The Wireless Age Magazine)
According to Marconi,
‘In the design and construction of the
Poldhu station I was assisted by Sir Ambrose Fleming, Mr. R. N. Vyvyan and Mr.
W. S. Entwistle.’
The Irish Leg at Crookhaven
By mid June, Marconi had built his new wireless station at
Brow Head near Crookhaven on the South West coast of Ireland. The County Cork
headland was Ireland’s most westly promintary. A one hundred and eighty foot
mast had been erected and a powerful transmitter installed to increase the
range of communications for ship to shore. When Marconi first arrived at the
small fishing port hundred turned out to welcome the wireless pioneer. Many of
those spectators were women hoping perhaps to catch the eye of the then
bachelor Marconi. His first experiment from the station was on June 16th
to contact the liner Lucania which was both en-route from New York across the
Atlantic and fitted with Marconi wireless equipment. A special train was
organised by the local Skibereen and Schull Tramway to bring a ‘record’ number
of spectators to Crookhaven to witness this breakthrough in communications.
According to the Southern Star newspaper ,
‘This event is no
doubt unique in the history of West Cork and we are certain that large numbers
will avail of the opportunity of witnessing this epoch making experiment’
Why Crookhaven?
Crookhaven already had been the epicentre of telegraphic
news. When the United States based Reuters news agency opened an office in
London in 1851, an office in Queenstown (Cobh) followed two years later. Up to
that stage in order to get the news scoop, reporters would travel precariously
on small currachs out to liners as they reached the Irish coast to get first
hands news from America and then make their way into Cork to file their stories.
With the arrival of Reuters, desperate to get an advantage over their
competitors including Hearst, they built a telegraph station in Crookhaven,
building a telegraph line to Cork City which was then linked to Dublin and
London giving the American news agency a four hour head start on other agencies
who were still using reporters making the dangerous passage to the Liners.
At the turn on the
twentieth century, the ionosphere was yet to be discovered and that radio
signals travelling long distances actually went upwards, bounced off the
ionosphere and back down to earth. Marconi believed at that time that signals
were linear and would use the ocean’s surface to conduct the signals over
distances. This had been the premise of Oliver Lodge in his early Wireless
Telegraphy experiments in Scotland, firstly crossing the Rover Tay and then
ambitiously planning to span the Atlantic, which never got off the ground. Ireland would later be
pivotal in the trans-Atlantic connection with the building of Marconi’s
powerful Clifden station.
On the opposite side
of the Atlantic, Marconi initially built a station at Wellfleet, Massachusetts
to communicate across the Atlantic but a storm destroyed the aerial array and a
new site had to be quickly chosen. Financial incentives took him north of the
border from the United States initially towards Nova Scotia before finally
settling at Signal Hill outside St. John’s, Newfoundland. In December 1901 he set sail for St. John's. He was under
pressure from shareholders and his growing ego to deliver on his promise that
wireless could commercially beat the undersea cable telegraph. He had been
heavily subsidized by his financial backers who saw huge profits in the trans-Atlantic
messaging. Marconi had with his travelling crew, a small stock of kites and
balloons to keep a single wire aloft in stormy weather.
A site was chosen on
Signal Hill, and apparatus was set up in an abandoned military hospital. A
cable was sent to Poldhu, requesting that the Morse letter " S " be
transmitted continuously from 3:00 to 7:00 PM local time.
On 12th December, 1901,
under strong wind conditions, a kite was launched with a long wire attached
beneath. The wind unfortunately carried it away. A second kite was launched.
The kite bobbed and weaved in the sky, making it difficult for Marconi to
adjust his new syntonic receiver which employed the new Italian Navy coherer. With
hindsight and today’s knowledge it is difficult to understand how Marconi
determined the frequency of tuning for his receiver.
‘The result was much
more than the mere successful realization of an experiment. It was a discovery
which proved that, contrary to the general belief, radio signals could travel
over such great distance a those separating Europe from America and it
constituted, as Sir Oliver Lodge has stated, an epoch in history’. (Marconi)
Marconi’s claim was,
‘On Monday, December
9th, barely three days after my arrival, I and my assistants began work on
Signal Hill. The weather was very bad and very cold. On the Tuesday we flew a
kite with 600 feet of antenna wire as a preliminary test, and on the Wednesday,
we had inflated one of our small balloons, which made its first ascent during
the morning. Owing, however, to the strength of the wind, the balloon soon
broke away and disappeared in the mist. I then concluded that perhaps kites
would answer better and decided to use them for the crucial test.
I had arranged with
my assistants in Cornwall to send a series of "S's" at a prearranged
speed during certain hours of the day. I chose the letter "S" because
it was easy to transmit, and with the very primitive apparatus used at Poldhu I
was afraid that the transmission of other Morse signals, which included dashes,
might perhaps cause too much strain on it and break it down. Mr. Entwistle, Mr.
George and Mr. Taylor were in charge of the English station at Poldhu during
the transmission of signals to Newfoundland.
The following day the
signals were reportedly again heard at Signal Hill, though not quite as
distinctly. According
to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers,
‘Marconi's
ambition at the turn of the century to demonstrate long-distance wireless communication,
and develop a profitable long-distance wireless telegraph service, led to his
pragmatic proposal in 1900 to send a wireless signal across the Atlantic. He conceived
a plan to erect two super-stations, one on each side of the Atlantic, for
two-way wireless communications, to bridge the two continents together in
direct opposition to the cable company (Anglo-American Telegraph Company). For
the eastern terminal, he leased land overlooking Poldhu cove in southwestern
Cornwall, England. For the western terminal, the sand dunes on the northern end
of Cape Cod, MA at South Wellfleet, was chosen.
The aerial array
comprised of 20 masts arranged in a circle. The ring of masts supported a
conical aerial system of 400 wires, each insulated at the top and connected at
the bottom, thus forming an inverted cone. Vyvyan, the Marconi engineer who
worked on the 1901 experiment, when shown the plan, did not think the design
sound. He was overruled, construction went ahead, and both aerial systems were
completed in early 1901. However, before testing could begin catastrophe
struck, the Poldhu aerial collapsed in a storm on 17 September, and the South
Wellfleet aerial suffered the same fate on 26 November, 1901.
At Poldhu Marconi quickly
erected two masts and put up an aerial of 54 wires, spaced 1 metre apart, and
suspended from a triadic stay stretched between these masts. The aerial wires
were arranged fan shaped and connected together at the lower end.
‘The
antenna was driven by the curious two stage spark transmitter, previously
discussed. There were many problems in getting it to work at the high power
levels desired. Our principal concern here is the frequency generated by the
Poldhu station. The oscillation frequency is determined by the natural resonant
response of the antenna system, which includes the inductance of the secondary
of the antenna transformer T2, since in effect the antenna system is
a base-loaded monopole’.
Historians have also
speculated that the transmitter might also have radiated a high-frequency
signal as well, since an HF signal would have been more suitable for
transatlantic communications. If, according to Belrose, Marconi had used a thin
wire transmitting antenna at Poldhu, this antenna would indeed have radiated
efficiently at odd harmonics of the fundamental resonant frequency. But according
to Electrical engineers today that they must conclude therefore that the Cornish
based spark-transmitter system radiated efficiently only on the fundamental
oscillation frequency of the tuned antenna system, about 850 kHz.
When Poldhu had become operational,
it was communicating successfully with stations in France and Europe and more
importantly with Marconi’s new wireless station at Crookhaven in County Cork,
on the southern coast. Work on building Crookhaven began in the summer of 1901.
According to Marconi,
the publicist, he recounted,
‘Another similar
station was erected at Cape Cod in Massachusetts. By the end of August, 1901,
the erection of the masts was nearly completed when a terrific gale swept the
English coasts, with the result that the masts were blown down and the whole
construction wrecked. I was naturally extremely disappointed at this unforeseen
accident, and for some days had visions of my test having to be postponed for
several months or longer, but eventually decided that it might be possible to
make a preliminary trial with a simpler aerial attached to a stay stretched
between two masts 170 feet high and consisting of sixty almost vertical wires.
By the time this aerial was erected another unfortunate accident, also caused
by a gale, occurred in America, destroying the antenna system of the Cape Cod
station.
I then decided,
notwithstanding this further setback, to carry out experiments to Newfoundland
with an aerial supported by balloon or kite, as it was clearly impossible at
that time of the year, owing to the wintry conditions and the shortness of the
time at our disposal, to erect high masts to support the receiving aerial. On
the twenty-sixth of November, 1900, I sailed from Liverpool accompanied by my
two technical assistants, Mr. G. S. Kemp and Mr. P. W. Paget.
We landed at St.
Johns, Newfoundland, on Friday. December the sixth, and before beginning
operations I visited the Governor, Sir Cavendish Boyle, and the Prime Minister.
Sir Robert Bond, and other members of the Newfoundland government, who promised
me their heartiest cooperation in order to facilitate my work. After taking a
look round at the various sites, I considered that the best one was to be found
on Signal Hill, a lofty eminence overlooking the harbour. On the top of this
hill was a small plateau which I thought suitable for flying either balloons or
kites. On a crag of this plateau rose the Cabot Memorial Tower and close to it
was an old military barracks. It was in a room of this building that I set up
my receiving apparatus in preparation for the great experiment.’
The newly constituted
Marconi company knew that they were not the only Wireless Telegraph company
attempting to span the Atlantic but they certainly wanted to be first and the
newspapers were following the build up to the attempt on both sides of the
Atlantic. Marconi knew that Professor Fessenden in the United States was making
great strides and had the Atlantic in his sights as has Sir Oliver Lodge in the
UK although unlike Marconi, Lodge’s plans were engineering based, while Marconi
saw the commercial possibilities of being both first and the most successful to
transmit across the Atlantic connecting London and New York.
According to Marconi,
‘On the morning of
Thursday, the twelfth of December, the critical moment for which I had been
working for so long at last arrived, and, in spite of the gale raging, we
managed to fly a kite carrying an antenna wire some 400 feet long. I was at
last on the point of putting the correctness of my belief to the test! Up to
then I had nearly always used a receiving arrangement including a coherer,
which recorded automatically signals through a relay and a Morse instrument. I
decided in this instance to use also a telephone connected to a self-restoring
coherer, the human ear being far more sensitive than the recorder.
Suddenly, at about
half-past twelve, a succession of three faint clicks on the telephone,
corresponding to the three dots of the letter S, sounded several times in my
ear, beyond the possibility of a doubt. I asked my assistant, Mr. Kemp, for
corroboration if he had heard anything. He had, in fact, heard the same signals
that I had.
I then knew that I
had been justified in my anticipations. The electric waves which were being
sent out into space from Poldhu had traversed the Atlantic, unimpeded by the
curvature of the earth which so many considered to be a fatal obstacle, and
they were now audible in my receiver in Newfoundland. I then felt for the first
time absolutely certain that the day when I should be able to send messages
without wires or cables across the Atlantic and across other oceans and,
perhaps, continents, was not far distant. The then enormous distance, for
radio, of 1,700 miles had been successfully bridged.’
But had the Atlantic been bridged and if it had, was it from Poldhu or
Crookhaven?
At the turn on the
twentieth century, the ionosphere was yet to be discovered and that radio
signals travelling long distances actually went upwards, bounced off the ionosphere
and back down to earth. Marconi believed at that time that signals were linear
and would use the ocean’s surface to conduct the signals over distances. This
had been the premise of Oliver Lodge in his early Wireless Telegraphy
experiments in Scotland, firstly crossing the Rover Tay and then ambitiously
planning to span the Atlantic, which never got off the ground. Ireland would later be pivotal in the trans-Atlantic
connection with the building of Clifden.
Initially Marconi
built a station at Wellfleet, Massachusetts to communicate across the Atlantic
but a storm destroyed the aerial array and a new site had to be chosen. A site was chosen on
Signal Hill, and apparatus was set up in an abandoned military hospital. A
cable was sent to Poldhu, requesting that the Morse letter " S " be
transmitted continuously from 3:00 to 7:00 PM local time.
On 12th December, 1901,
under strong wind conditions, a kite was launched with a 155 m long wire. The
wind carried it away. A second kite was launched with a 152.4 m wire attached.
The kite bobbed and weaved in the sky, making it difficult for Marconi to
adjust his new syntonic receiver which employed the Italian Navy coherer.
"Difficult" I will accept, but how he determined the frequency of
tuning for his receiver is a mystery to me. Whatever, because of this
difficulty, Marconi decided to use his older untuned receiver. History has
assumed that he substituted the metal filings coherer previously used with this
receiver for the newly acquired Italian Navy coherer, but Marconi never really
said he did. He referred only to the use of three types of
coherers.
‘The result was much
more than the mere successful realization of an experiment. It was a discovery
which proved that, contrary to the general belief, radio signals could travel
over such great distance a those separating Europe from America and it
constituted, as Sir Oliver Lodge has stated, an epoch in history’
Marconi celebrating
his own success.
Then Marconi’s claim
was,
‘On Monday, December
9th, barely three days after my arrival, I and my assistants began work on
Signal Hill. The weather was very bad and very cold. On the Tuesday we flew a
kite with 600 feet of antenna wire as a preliminary test, and on the Wednesday
we had inflated one of our small balloons, which made its first ascent during
the morning. Owing, however, to the strength of the wind, the balloon soon
broke away and disappeared in the mist. I then concluded that perhaps kites
would answer better and decided to use them for the crucial test.
I had arranged with
my assistants in Cornwall to send a series of "S's" at a prearranged
speed during certain hours of the day. I chose the letter "S" because
it was easy to transmit, and with the very primitive apparatus used at Poldhu I
was afraid that the transmission of other Morse signals, which included dashes,
might perhaps cause too much strain on it and break it down. Mr. Entwistle, Mr.
George and Mr. Taylor were in charge of the English station at Poldhu during the
transmission of signals to Newfoundland. On the following day the signals were
again heard, though not quite as distinctly. However, there was no further
doubt possible that the experiment had succeeded.’
The experiments were suddenly brought to a halt when the
Anglo American Telegraph Company sought a legal restraint claiming that he was
interfering with their exclusive contract to telegraph connections across the
Atlantic, as they controlled the majority of the undersea cables connecting
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia with Ireland and then onto Europe.
Crookhaven
According to the IEEE,
‘Despite
the crude equipment employed, and in our view the impossibility of hearing the
signal, Marconi and his assistant George Kemp convinced themselves that they
could hear on occasion the rhythm of three clicks more or less buried in the
static, and clicks they would be if heard at all, because of the low spark
rate. Marconi wrote in his laboratory notebook: Sigs at 12:30, 1:10 and 2:20
(local time). This notebook is in the Marconi Company archives and is the only
proof today that the signal was received.’
Marconi himself has been
evasive concerning the frequency of his Poldhu transmitter. Fleming in a
lecture he gave in 1903 said that the wavelength was of 1000 feet or more, say,
one-fifth to one-quarter of a mile (820 kHz is the generally quoted frequency).
Marconi remained silent on this wavelength, but in 1908 in a lecture to the
Royal Institution he quotes the wavelength as 1200 feet. But in 1901, anyone
who believed that they could, and did, believed so as an act of faith based on
the integrity of one man – Marconi.
‘The
antenna was driven by the curious two stage spark transmitter, previously
discussed. There were many problems in getting it to work at the high power
levels desired. Our principal concern here is the frequency generated by the
Poldhu station. The oscillation frequency is determined by the natural resonant
response of the antenna system, which includes the inductance of the secondary
of the antenna transformer, since in effect the antenna system is a base-loaded
monopole’.
CONCLUSION
The first trans-Atlantic wireless telegraph message
was received at Signal Hill from Crookhaven, Cork in Ireland. Not Poldhu.
Despite skepticism by many historians and electrical engineers, I believe that
Marconi did manage to span the Atlantic with a message through the ether using
wireless telegraphy but perhaps this success was accidental, not realising his
signals were being deflected by the ionosphere. But I do not subscribe to the
‘fact’ that the signal across the Atlantic emitted from Poldhu in Cornwall and
arrived on the opposite side of the Atlantic at St. John’s. In fact the truth
is that Poldhu tapped out the letter ‘s’ as Marconi requested but rather than
reaching Newfoundland it was picked up in Crookhaven (perhaps as planned) and
retransmitted from Crookhaven to Signal Hill, St. John’s. Therefore the first
transatlantic message was not Poldhu to St. John’s but Crookhaven to St. Johns,
Ireland to Canada rather than England to Canada. Whether this was the actual
plan, is not lost in the fog of time but if it was Marconi’s belief that the
oceans would conduct his signal, then the inference is that he would transmit
between the two closest points, Crookhaven and St. John’s. It was also winter
and the seas were unpredictable and rough, which would be another excellent
argument for broadcasting between the two closets points in his network of
wireless stations.
The origin of the transmission being designated as
coming from Poldhu would have been important for investors and attracting others.
It would demonstrate that the invested cash was being put to good work. For it
to be commercially successful, a service from the UK mainland to the United
States would be far more valuable than Ireland to the United States. If the
transmission success was from Poldhu it would rule out the middle man, Ireland,
and speed up the time of message transmission from London to New York. This
would be valuable in tackling the success of the undersea cable telegraph
companies.
In Orrin Dunlap’s book, ‘Marconi, The Man and his Wireless’,
which celebrated the work of the Irish-Italian inventor and entrepreneur, he
referred to and quoted fellow wireless telegraphy pioneer Sir Oliver Lodge.
Lodge, a competitor of Marconi, wrote in his own book ‘Talks About Wireless’
published in 1925, recounting the event of the first trans-Atlantic
communication, that,
‘When Signor Marconi
succeeded in sending the letter ‘S’ by morse signals from Cornwall to Ireland
to Newfoundland, it constituted an epoch in human history, on its physical side
and was an astonishing and remarkable feat’
The first public two-way wireless telegraph
communication happened on January 19th, 1903 when a message from US President
Theodore Roosevelt at the White House was transmitted via Morse code and sent to King Edward VII at
Buckingham Palace in England, who in turn responded to Roosevelt.
That day, US newspaper 'The Evening World', published that “Word is Flashed from Roosevelt to King
Edward” as it reported that Guglielmo Marconi and his team successfully sent
the first transatlantic radio transmission from the US. Marconi and his
assistants, Kemp, Taylor, Sargent, and Bradfield, were reportedly surprised
that the message was received and deciphered on the first attempt. Trans-Atlantic was a
reality and here to stay.
‘Fessenden and
Marconi: Their Differing Technologies and Transatlantic Experiments During the
First Decade of this Century’ by John S. Belrose lecture for the International
Conference on 100 Years of Radio -- 5-7 September 1995
Sources
https://worldradiohistory.com/
The Irish Newspaper Archives
The British Newspaper Archives
The US Library of Congress
Marconi & Ireland , Sexton UCC
Orrin Dunlap 'Marconi & His Wireless'
The Marconi Archives
Cambridge University Libraries
Oliver Lodge 'Talks About Wireless'
The Irish Pirate Radio Archive
The Wireless Age magazines.
