Marconi’s Wireless Station
In these days of instant worldwide communications via satellites, it is difficult to imagine the excitement that came with the advent of wireless telegraphy and radio. In the 1890s, the idea of transmitting long-distance messages via electromagnetic waves captured the imagination of Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian. In 1899 Marconi succeeded in sending a radio message across the English Channel, and, he went to work on developing a transatlantic system. Two communications cables already had been laid on the bottom of the ocean between France and Cape Cod. Marconi, too, selected a site for a station on the Cape, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean in South Wellfleet. He built others at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and at Poldhu in Great Britain. At first the antennas at South Wellfleet and Poldhu consisted of huge rings of masts, but these were destroyed by gales before any messages could be transmitted. They were replaced at each place by 4 towers 210 feet high. In December 1901, at an experimental site in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Marconi received the first transatlantic signal, 3 dots for the letter “S,” from Britain. In December 1902 his Glace Bay station received a complete message from Poldhu. On the night of January 18, 1903, he transmitted from South Wellfleet this message, in Morse code, from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII: “In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and to all the people of the British Empire.” The king replied in a similar vein, making this the first 2-way wireless communication between Europe and America. Soon newspapers and others were transmitting messages across the Atlantic, and the wireless became the common way of communicating with ships. For 15 years telegraphers sent out messages on the South Wellfleet spark-gap transmitter. But in 1917 the Navy closed the station. It was dismantled in 1920 and scrapped. Its successor, WCC in Chatham, operated until 1993.
Guglielmo Marconi displays his wireless telegraphy equipment in England in 1896. The Leyden jar capacitor and boxlike transformer (below) represent an application of Marconi’s invention in World War I for national defense, maritime safety, and commercial communications.
At South Wellfleet Marconi first built a circular antenna consisting of 20 ship masts 200 feet high about 165 feet back from the edge of the ridge overlooking the Atlantic. The masts were blown down in a storm November 25, 1901.
This ironstone plate commemorates the first wireless message, received from President Theodore Roosevelt by King Edward VII on January 19, 1903, and shows the 4 towers that replaced the 20 masts.
Part 3
Guide and Adviser
