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.
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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.
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.
It’s what hams do.
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