Today many of us take for granted satellite TV, mobile phones and high speed internet to keep us in touch with world events. For many the only way is to use radio as the method of keeping in touch. There is something special about using the radio whether listing to documentaries, sports commentaries or news broadcasts. Radio lets us create our own pictures of what is being described in our minds eye. The world is definitely getting smaller, metaphorically speaking, due to the advances in communication. A major step to this was on 13th May 1897 when the first radio transmission across open sea was made.
The first successful transmission was made by Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937) the Italian inventor between Flat Holm and Lavernock Point. Flat Holm is a limestone island about 4 miles off the Welsh coast, known in Welsh as Ynys Echni. Lavernock Point is a small cliff on the coast of mainland Wales and is in direct line of sight of Flat Holm. Marconi had set up a mast on the cliff at Lavernock Point and attached his receiving apparatus to it. The transmissions were made from Flat Holm. For several days all attempts failed. Then Marconi decided to move the receiving apparatus down to the beach and extend the wire back up the cliff to the mast. Success! The first transmission was a Morse code message asking ‘Are you ready?’ However, this was not the first transmission over water, which had happened eight years earlier at Coniston Water in England’s Lake district. It did however pave the way for radio transmissions to be extended in distance until in 1901 Marconi claimed he successfully transmitted radio waves between Poldhu, Cornwall England and Signal Hill in St John’s, Newfoundland Canada. However the claims were treated with scepticism as there had been no independent validation and the received signal was hard to distinguish from atmospheric background noise. So in 1902 Marconi set sail on the SS Philadelphia heading west and recorded radio signals up to a distance of 1,551 miles, somewhat short of the Newfoundland claim. The first west to east transmission from the US to the UK occurred in December that year and on 18th January 1903 Theodore Roosevelt, the President of the United States sent a radio message to King Edward VII of the UK.
Perhaps one of the best known and regrettable uses of Marconi’s wireless system was aboard the Titanic which was lost in 1912. The radio operators aboard the ship were employed by Marconi not White Star the ships owners.
So why not celebrate the early years of radio by making up one of the 1:12th scale wireless kits, available from our web shop