On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in sending the first wireless radio transmission across the Atlantic, or so he claimed. From a small room atop windblown Signal Hill in Newfoundland, Canada, Marconi received a series of messages that day sent from another Marconi station 2,200 miles away in Cornwall, England. They were simple, each consisting of just three telegraphic dots to relay the letter “s,” which Marconi considered enough proof that they had achieved the feat. With the confirmation of his assistant George Kemp that he too had heard the messages, they announced their news to the world.
Marconi had been interested in radio from an early age. He had been a tinkerer throughout his teen years, assisted by his butler and using the grounds of his family’s estate in Bologna, Italy as his testing lab. His work changed from hobby to profession when, as the story goes, he woke his mother one night and called her into his room to show her that he could now make a bell ring on the other side of the room by pressing a button on the other. There were no wires connecting the two. This was a feat not just impressive for a 20 year-old, but entirely unheard of at the time anywhere in the world. Funded by his parents and emboldened by his successes, Marconi pushed his experiments further and began to transmit over longer and longer distances.
His radio claims were met with a mix of wonder and incredulity. In Italy it was much more of the latter, pushing Marconi to decamp for England and set up his Marconi radio company there. In England he moved his technology further, transmitting telegraphic signals over hundreds of miles, all the while growing his stature as a young inventor. At just 23 years old he presented to the English scientific society, the Royal Institution, an august scientific body that has produced numerous Nobel laureates and seen lectures by scientific legends including Humphrey Davy ad Michael Faraday. Marconi was a phenom, near single-handedly inventing wireless radio transmission.
He set his sights high: transmitting across the Atlantic Ocean. With a station already set up in Cornwall, England, Marconi set out for the appropriately named Signal Hill in Newfoundland and set up a temporary workstation from which he could receive messages. On the agreed upon date, Marconi dispatched three local me he’d hired to raise a 6 foot tall kite 500 feet into the air, dragging his antenna cable high enough to receive far-away transmissions. As these men stood chattering in the brisk wind and bitter cold, Marconi and Kemp sat in their workshop and awaited the signal. As there was much static on the line, Marconi was unable to use the telegraphic receiver that records received messages onto a strip of paper. Instead he strained his ears against the noise to try and pick out a signal audibly. He reported hearing it numerous times, something Kemp corroborates, but without the telegraph paper as proof, there was no way of certifying that what they’d heard was actually the signal from England.
While Marconi’s transatlantic signal from December 12, 1901 is entirely unverifiable, there is little doubt that Marconi at some point sent the first transatlantic radio transmission. To back up his transatlantic claim, he boarded a ship in England and sailed west, transmitting at regular intervals and increasing distances. He was able to repeat his transmission here up to 2,100 miles away. Just over a year after his first (and disputed) signal, he relayed a message from President Roosevelt to the English King via transatlantic transmission. Essentially, if Marconi’s pioneering signal didn’t come in on that windy hill in 1901, then he received it in 1902 or 1903. While the date is disputed, there is no question that Marconi is responsible for this leap forward in radio technology, and that from the humble beginnings of tinkering with radio equipment in his bedroom laboratory, Marconi created technologies that changed the world.