PROJECT DIANA: RADAR REACHES THE MOON
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TO THE MOON AND BACK
​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

The Human and Scientific Legacy of Project Diana

ON THE MARCONI TRAIL: A TALE OF THREE PILGRIMAGES

4/22/2016

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International Marconi Day is a 24-hour amateur radio event held annually to commemorate the birth of Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian wireless radio pioneer, on April 25, 1874. The event is observed on the Saturday closest to Marconi’s birthday; this year it happens tomorrow, on April 23. 

Marconi showed an early interest in and aptitude for electronics, sending a wireless message from his bedroom to his mother's garden at the age of sixteen. Fortunately for him, his parents had both the inclination and wealth to support his talents. In his early twenties, failing to generate much interest in his work in his native Italy, he relocated to England and also spent much time in America, combing the coasts of both continents for spots suited to transatlantic radio communication, and leaving many wireless telegraph stations in his wake. 

Among Marconi’s hand-picked sites was the Belmar Marconi receiving station, located on a hilltop on the south bank of the Shark River Basin, at what later became Camp Evans, home of Project Diana and a stone's throw from my childhood home in Shark River Hills. The original buildings were constructed between 1912 and 1914 by the JG White Engineering Corporation for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America as part of Marconi’s “World Encircling Wireless Girdle” project. Weak transatlantic signals received at the Belmar Station were then relayed via a landline connection to a high-power transmitting station in New Brunswick, 32 miles to the northwest.

In 1913 Marconi returned to his native Italy, where he and his wife became part of Rome society and he was made a member of the Italian Senate. During World War II he was placed in charge of  the Italian military’s radio services. Sadly but perhaps inevitably, Marconi later in life joined the Italian Fascist party and became an active defender of its ideology. 

Today we honor him not for his politics but for his work as a visionary who, ahead of his time, dreamed of a connected world and dedicated his life to making his dream come true - an accomplishment for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909.

* * * * * * * * * *

Several decades ago my husband (call sign K8EV) and I had to cut short our delightful meanderings in southern England at the Devonshire-Cornwall border in order to keep an appointment with some friends in the Lake District. In 2010, we jumped at a chance to pick up where we left off and spent the better part of a fortnight exploring Cornwall. An unlikely (to me) highlight of our tour was a visit to the Marconi Centre in Poldhu, site of the Poldhu Wireless Station, where Marconi claimed (somewhat controversially) to have transmitted the first east-to-west transatlantic radio message in December, 1901, to his station on Signal Hill, St. John's, Newfoundland. The Poldhu station was built partly on enclosed pastures that remain to this day, making it hard to keep antennas in working order because the cows apparently have a taste for coaxial cable. The original station was designed by John Ambrose Fleming, who invented the ancestor of all vacuum tubes, earning him the sobriquet "father of modern electronics."

​That station was decommissioned in 1934 and demolished in 1937, but six acres were given to the National Trust in 1937 and more land added in 1960. The Marconi Centre, built in 2001, houses a Marconi museum and also provides meeting space for the Poldhu Amateur Radio Club, GB2GM. It took a little persistence to find the site but we ended up spending a fine afternoon perusing the museum's fascinating exhibits and chatting with the local hams.
Fast forward to 2014, when my husband and I, car trekking across the Canadian Maritimes, realized we were within striking distance of another Marconi historic site, this one at Table Head in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, where Marconi transmitted (this time indisputably) the first west-to-east transatlantic message in December, 1902. Again, it took some looking to locate it despite my best efforts at iPhone navigation. Unlike Poldhu, there was no welcoming committee, just an isolated commemorative plaque to mark the start of a cold, windy walk to the edge of a cliff. Nonetheless, we added another notch to our Marconi belt.
Last summer, after I thought I’d long since finished going through my father’s collection of documents and photographs, my sister found one last box in her garage that she sent to me to deal with in my role as family archivist. Included among the photos was a small packet of faded images I’d never seen before but that nonetheless looked oddly familiar. I quickly realized that they dated to the 1970s and that I was looking at yet another Marconi pilgrimage, this one by my Dad (call sign W2AXO), to Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Marconi had selected Cape Cod because of its easterly location and, after scouting a couple of other possible places, settled on an 8-acre parcel in South Wellfleet. In 1903, he persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to send a message to King Edward VII of England, conveyed in Morse code to the Poldhu Station in Cornwall. Expecting only a confirmation from the Glace Bay Station in Nova Scotia that the message had been relayed to England, they instead received an immediate reply from King Edward himself. 
I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. Although the bleak, windswept Marconi stations that dot both Atlantic coasts are not most people’s idea of vacation resorts, they provide radio buffs with a window into Marconi’s mind, a place where they can stop and speculate about why Marconi, surrounded by his surveyors’ maps, preferred this promontory to the next outcropping up the coast. Somehow I suspect there will be more Marconi pilgrimages in my future.

It’s what hams do. 
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THE TOM THUMB WEDDING

4/13/2016

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The Wedding Party
Awhile ago Bill Evers, younger brother of my childhood friend Sally, sent me a photo of the wedding party of a “Tom Thumb Wedding” in which I participated at the Shark River Hills Clubhouse - thus doubling my collection of photos from this event. (I’ve since acquired one more - all three are included here.) Bill remarked at the time that the concept of a mock wedding for children was foreign to him. I too think it odd - not only from my adult perspective, but I actually remember finding it difficult to wrap my brain around at the time. (Remind me, why are we doing this?)

So I did what I always do at such moments - googled - and found that the event was part of a tradition inspired by the real-life wedding of Charles Stratton, a dwarf who performed and traveled with PT Barnum as "General Tom Thumb", and Lavinia Warren, only a few inches taller than her groom. It is almost impossible to recapture the excitement generated by this event, which was probably the closest American equivalent to a royal wedding. Details about the bridal gown and trousseau were bruited about in the press, costly gifts were forwarded from around the world, and socialites vied (and paid) for invitations to the ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church in Manhattan on February 10, 1863. The wedding and its associated festivities provided a war-weary nation with a welcome respite. President and Mrs Lincoln themselves became involved, hosting a lavish reception in the diminutive couple's honor and inviting them to honeymoon in the White House. 

Shortly thereafter, reenactments of the wedding started being staged by schools and churches all over the country, as youth activities and fund raisers, and also to teach children "values." The practice seems to die out from time to time, only to spring back into vogue. Even today, reports and photos of recent Tom Thumb weddings can be found in the press and online. (A modern twist: A gofundme site appealing for contributions to support a boy's candidacy for the role of groom!) Small children (usually under the age of ten) formed the cast, although sometimes the minister was played by an adult. In the one in which I participated, which took place on July 27, 1950, all the characters were played by children, minister included, with music provided by a couple of slightly older kids. Participation was maximized by including not only a full wedding party but also guests - prominent members of the community also impersonated by children.
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Leslie and Cindy Stodola
I won’t say it wasn’t fun. My sister Leslie played a bridesmaid and I played Bill and Sally’s mom, Mary Jane. I think she supplied the silky navy blue dress I wore, heavily altered to fit a seven-year-old; possibly the hat was hers as well. I felt very dignified, though in retrospect I wonder what she made of her pint-sized doppelgänger, bedecked in her finery and tottering around in high heeled shoes that were several sizes too large. My “husband,” Jim Evers, was played by a boy named Eddie Jackson, whom I didn’t know very well and might not even remember except for that chance coupling (in which, by the way, no consent or choice was offered - all the decisions including casting were strictly top-down). The two of us appear side-by-side at the far right of the front row in the group photo of the wedding guests (below).

Did this spectacle provide anything beyond amusement for the participants and spectators? Did it instill an appreciation of commitment and responsibility? Did it help to prepare us for the adult world? Did the pomp and pageantry promote community spirit? Did it, on the other hand, encourage us to cling to a stereotyped set of middle-class mores and discourage openness to other life choices? Did these elaborate charades have the effect of reducing what is meant to be a solemn occasion to a circus sideshow? 

According to historical novelist Melanie Benjamin, blogging in the Huffington Post, Lavinia Warren Stratton “never really knew how to view these staged weddings; were they tributes to her great love? Or mockeries?” If Lavinia herself was puzzled, I guess I can be excused for my own mixed feelings about the Tom Thumb wedding. 
Picture
The Wedding Guests
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    CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

    I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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