“Laying the underwater cables costs so much that the telegraph companies have to impose very high charges for the service. My system will lower the costs a great deal”. He ended his speech with: “I drink to the health of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers”.
The dinner was a triumph for Guglielmo and the next day the New York Times wrote in its editorial: “Marconi’s words were so modest, so lacking in any exaggeration for commercial ends, so generous in recognizing his debt towards the pioneers of research whose path he has followed, so frank in giving credit to the alive and the dead and nevertheless so cautious in giving advance notice of the developments of the work he is carrying out that all those present felt obliged to give Marconi not only the honour of his discovery but also the higher honour which is due to him who puts the truth before every jealousy and professional rivalry. From the laurel crown fashioned for his head he took branches to make garlands also for all his predecessors and colleagues in the study of electric waves and this spontaneous gift has enriched rather than impoverished him”.
In a letter to The Times of London Professor Ambrose Fleming wrote: “When one thinks that those dots and dashes are the result of electric wave trains travelling at the speed of light in infinite space, picked up by the thin wire of an antenna, automatically severed and translated by two pieces of apparatus into intelligible messages in different languages, the wonder of it all cannot but strike the imagination”.
In Canada, Guglielmo founded the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, which was controlled by the Marconi Company of London. He was delighted to hear the news that Thomas Edison had bought shares in his company.
Alexander Graham Bell had become a friend of Guglielmo’s and had told him that he could use some land belonging to him on the beach of Beinn Breagh for his new radio station; however, Guglielmo had to refuse the offer, because he realized it was too far inland from the Atlantic to allow him to transmit across the ocean. Guglielmo visited different places along the Canadian coast accompanied by the Canadian personalities of the day. It was still winter. The weather could not have been worse; snow, rain and strong winds reduced visibility almost to nothing. In the month of March, 1902 he finally found the most suitable geographic position to install a new radio station on the island of Cape Breton at Table Head a locality situated a mile away from Glace Bay which received great economic benefits from this, changing it from an agricultural town to an important commercial centre.
The radio station at Table Head became larger and three times more powerful than the one at Poldhu. All the radio stations were built on the Atlantic coasts and were thus always exposed to the danger of storms and winter gales. The unfavourable climate was one of the greatest problems for the radio stations. Guglielmo regularly sailed across the ocean to check that everything worked and to improve the transmissions; the yacht’s radio station became his own personal laboratory. In this way he maintained the long-distance contact between the transmitting and receiving stations, built on two promontories on either side of the Atlantic.
Guglielmo told me that his life at that time was particularly busy; he personally supervised the building of the new radio stations, just as he chose all his assistants himself. He was full of optimism and enthusiasm and he did everything he could to inspire the same feelings in the people who helped him. Mr. Vyvyen worked for a long time in Canada; he was in charge of the radio stations during Guglielmo’s absence. In an article he wrote about my husband, he said: “Only those who have worked with Marconi throughout these four years realize the wonderful courage he showed under frequent disappointments, the extra-ordinary fertility of his mind in inventing new methods to displace others found faulty, and his willingness to work, often for sixteen hours at a time, when any interesting development was being tested.” One of Guglielmo’s characteristics was his ability to choose the right person for each job. He and Vyvyan worked together hour after hour at the Poldhu, Clifden and Table Head radio stations. Guglielmo was known as an approachable person who had faith in those who worked for him. He thought sincerity was very important, but he was also sensitive enough to know when it was better to keep quiet.
Here, by the way, I should like to mention that Guglielmo spent the summer of 1902 on board the ship, the Carlo Alberto. Sailing between Russia and North Africa, he carried out tests on the “magnetic detector”, a technological jewel he had invented which was unaffected by the ship’s movement but so sensitive that it could pick up even the faintest electric waves. In October of the same year he was once again on board the Carlo Alberto, which was to take him from England to Cape Breton in Canada. He perfected his magnetic detector while he was in constant contact with Poldhu. When he arrived in the town of Glace Bay he was met by a myriad of boats and hundreds of people who had come to welcome him, including his loyal assistants, Mr Kemp, Mr Paget and Mr Vyvyan. The Carlo Alberto continued its voyage and anchored in the port of Sydney; here, too, Guglielmo was received with great enthusiasm and gratitude by the local press and by the members of the Sebastian Cabot Society, an important Canadian association.
Canada still feels a debt of gratitude to Guglielmo because his invention gave work to the inhabitants of the island of Cape Breton both to guarantee the constant functioning of his radio stations and to construct and perfect the equipment he invented. For his part, my husband was grateful to the Canadian government and the people of Cape Breton. When he spoke to me about those years, Guglielmo made me feel the great emotion he had felt every time he crossed the Atlantic and admired the natural beauties of the Canadian coasts when they were lit up by the summer sun.
In January, 1903 Marconi arrived on Cape Cod where the South Wellfleet station had been rebuilt with a new set of towers supporting a “V” shaped aerial, modelled on the ones at Poldhu and Table Head. He established a radio link to send messages from the Cape Cod station to Poldhu via Table Head and viceversa. In spite of the bad winter weather, on 19th January1903 Guglielmo successfully transmitted a message from President Roosevelt to King Edward VII. The signal from Poldhu acknowledging reception of the message did not come back to Cape Cod via Table Head as expected but directly from Poldhu to Cape Cod.
The President’s message read:
His Majesty, Edward VII
London, Eng.
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 all the people of the British Empire.
Theodore Roosevelt
Wellfleet, Mass., Jan.19, 1903.
The reply from the King came back:
Sandringham, Jan. 19, 1903
The President,
White House, Washington, America
I thank you most sincerely for the kind message which I have just received from you, through Marconi’s trans-Atlantic wireless telegraphy. I sincerely reciprocate in the name of the people of the British Empire the cordial greetings and friendly sentiment expressed by you on behalf of the American Nation and I heartily wish you and your country every possible prosperity.
Edward R. and I.
My husband enjoyed telling me about that time when he was young, when the new radio service on ships also began. Cunard was the first shipping company which had confidence in him and agreed to his proposal to install it on their transatlantic liners. This was a success for Guglielmo as a businessman and profitable for the Marconi Company.
In 1905, six miles from Table Head and a little further inland, he set up another radio station which was given the name of “Marconi Towers”. The spectacular sight of this larger and more powerful radio station could be admired from at least fifty miles away. In the same year Guglielmo also began work on a new radio station at Clifden in Ireland to communicate with Cape Breton. The site he chose was on a plain near the beautiful Atlantic coast of Connemara in south-west Ireland. It was well-equipped and more powerful than the one at Poldhu, although less so than the station at Coltano, the most important one, which was in Italy near Livorno. The Clifden station was inaugurated on 15th October1907 when a successful radio transmission with Glace Bay was carried out. Guglielmo was particularly