Long distance wireless communication may be one of the most technologically innovative industries of our time, but also is one of deep roots, especially with all broadcast towers.
A historically timeline of Guglielmo Marconi’s foray into the field was recently documented on CapeCod.com, which starts off mentioning that the first transatlantic wireless communication from the United States took place on January 18, 1903. It was a “simple exchange of greetings” between President Theodore Roosevelt and Britain’s King Edward VII. Marconi, born into Italian nobility as Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi in Bologna, he began experimenting with wireless transmission in 1894, the site said. Marconi received his first patent in 1896 and facilitated the 1903 communications from his station that he built in Wellfleet, MA.
While Cape Cod’s Wellfleet station may have been the most well known, Marconi also built stations in Siasconset on Nantucket, just off the Cape in Marion and a station in Chatham. CapeCod.com revealed that the Marion station, built in 1914, was the largest at 144 acres. It housed 14 408-foot-tall towers. “These towers were meant to be a direct communication line to the corresponding receiving station in Stavanger, Norway. At the time of its construction this station was called a ‘wonder of the 20th century.’”
Marconi built the Siasconset station in 1901. It closed after World War I, but not before it made its mark as the first American station to receive distress calls from the Titanic. Then, the Wellfleet station closed due to stormy seas on the Cape. Marconi looked for a permanent location for his wireless transmitter, finding Ryder’s Cove in Chatham. “The Chatham station was christened WCC and it is the current home of the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center, which opened in 2010,” CapeCod.com reported. There were six 400-foot-tall towers there, but they have since been removed. There now is an Antenna Field Trail, a hike that leads you along the path of where the original six antennas stood.
Marconi, who died in 1937 in Italy, won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1909.
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