Colwyn Bay Wireless College

 

For several years now I've been seeing folks selling ads snipped from magazines and newspapers. It's a little problematic to have the content removed from it's source material. The same complaint exists in archeology. The artifact is interesting by itself, but without context it loses some meaning. I don't know where this ad came from originally. But I have found others similar to it from the 1930s. I found a google site that fills in some of the blanks. That website reports that the college was established in 1920 and operated until 1971, which disagrees slightly with other sources. 

Even more interesting is that the school, which more likely operated from 1923 to 1973, has it's own alumni facebook page. That in turn revealed that a few alum even published books! But inexplicably many students, even those writing about the town of Colwyn Bay ignore the topic. Many touch on it briefly, the book A-Z of Colwyn Bay by Graham Roberts has a few sentences it under the section about Coleg Llandrillo Menai. The Colwyn Bay heritage website at least has some great pictures.

In Wireless world, September, 1922 there were a few ads for wireless radio supplies sold by the Wireless College. A college-operated mail order business is a little unusual, but typically what they're selling is diplomas. This was a whole host of wireless equipment: valves, enclosures, tubes, batteries, insulators etc. The book Wireless, the Crucial Decade: History of the British Wireless Industry by Gordon Bussey briefly mentions these Colwyn Bay Wireless College wireless kits but not a word about the school. The book Colwyn Bay at War From Old Photographs by Graham Roberts does address the school at some length.

"The college building was at the far end of the East Parade; the college and the Parade have now been demolished to make way for the A55 and a plaque in a car park now commemorates the work done by the College in training radio operators..."

The Roberts book picks a different year for it's start, dating it back to 1918 as founded by Gordon Scott Whale as the "North Wales Wireless College" but that he moved it to Colwyn Bay in 1923.Whale converted an 8-gabled 3 story home called "Olive House" into the college. Gordon was born in 1893 so he would have been 25 years old when he founded the school and 30 years old when it moved to Colwyn Bay.

Gordon Whale joined the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) in 1926, and had previously trained at the Direct Spanish Telegraph Company and worked for Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company. A 1937 article also added the acronyms AMIRE, and MAAAS to his resume, that specifies Associate Member, Institution of Electrical Engineers. MAAS probably stands for Member, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. Though that makes little sense for a British private school teacher, it was founded in 1780 and is possible. Radio Pictorial magazine wrote up his two colleges in 1938 and added a third acronym: FRSA, which is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. 

I've not seen a book with specified which Marconi station Whale worked at. The Journal of the Royal Society of Arts mentioned in his obituary that he worked at both the Wales and Ireland stations. The station in Wales was Carnavon. Construction started in 1914, and it sent it's first messages in 1918. It was located on a mountain, Cefn Du, and used the call letters MUU. But in Ireland Marconi operated three different stations, of them Clifden seems the most likely, though Crookhaven was open as early as 1902. 

As the school grew, Whale hired Charles Oliver as a tutor in 1926, then Harry Nelson in 1930. Volume 15, 1925, of the magazine "The Child" contained a list of Schools and educational institutions which included some extra details on Colwyn Bay and a short description:

"The North Bay Wireless College, Colwyn Bay, Students 15-23 years of age rapidly trained for lucrative appointments in the Wireless and Cable Services. College Stands in 5½ acres of grounds overlooking sea, and is 400 feet above sea level..."

Somehow in 1937 Gordon opened a second wireless college in Calmore, Southhampton. The building was originally called Loperwood Manor. It planned for 50 students on a 16 acre property. By 1938 it had expanded to handle 100 students and they bought another 40 acres of land. It closed in 1940 due to the hostilities of WWI. Being on the English Channel, 30,000 bombs were dropped on Southhampton just in 1940.

In 1937 Practical Wireless Magazine wrote an article about a visit by Sir Ambrose Fleming. Yes, the one who invented the vacuum tube.  That article is the only image of Whale I've found. Whale had retired in 1935 from Colwyn Bay, but returned in 1940 for the war effort. In 1944 The Electrician magazine reported that a group of privately owned British wireless schools had decided to form The National Association of Wireless Colleges. The chairman was B. G. Morton or the Manchester Wireless College and the honorary Secretary was Mr. Gordon Whale. Strangely I have never found another reference to the National Association of Wireless Colleges. Perhaps it was not at long lived as the Colwyn Bay Wireless College. 

Harry Nelson retired in July 1966 after 36 years at the college. Gordon Scott Whale died that year at the age of 72. Wireless World noted in their obituary that Gordon died on January 9th onboard the RMS Andes. Some of their marketing from that year has survived which reads "Be well away when winter chills in January - March 1966." The retrofitted cruise liner went to Barbados that Spring. His son Neville had already succeeded him as principle of the college. Neville kept the school running another 7 years until it closed in 1973. The former college building was demolished for the A55 when it was split into dual lanes in the 1980s.

Marconi Station at Clifden Connemara and the IRA

I feel like Marconi get entirely too much credit for the birth of radio. Nonetheless I keep coming back to  particular parts of his story. Clifden like many others bears further examination.

After Marconi transmitted wireless messages from his station at Poldhu in Cornwall to Newfoundland on December 12th, 1901, he won a grant of $80,000 from the Canadian Government to build a station at Glace Bay in Nova Scotia.  So he moved his operation west... to Clifden in County Galway, Ireland, in the region of Connemara, located on the Owenglin River where it flows into Clifden Bay. It moved him over 300 miles closer to Canada. More here.

In 1907, the Daily Mail newspaper published a very graphic description of the station operations here. It's well worth reading. You can imagine the writer wearing protective goggles and standing there in the smoke with cotton in his ears bewildered at the machinery and the flashes of light expecting Marconi to do everything short of resurrecting the dead. I quote here at length because the language is truly amazing. James Joyce could hardly have done better.

"An entire room is given up to strange sheets of steel, which are hung from roof to floor, like washing on a line, until only narrow alleys are left. Queer brown earthenware jars, like old-fashioned receptacles, and all manner of outlandish electrical apparatus now confront the visitor. The plates are for acting as a reservoir to store electrical energy. The jars are transformers. The engineer gave a few directions to his assistant, who, seated before an ordinary Morse telegraph instrument in the operating room, placed a telephone headpiece to his ears, and began to fumble with the key, hastily bidding me to stuff cotton wool in my ears and don a pair of blue-glass spectacles. The engineer beckoned me to the connection room on the floor above, which is equipped with a medley of strange electrical contrivances.  The use of the cotton-wool and smoked glasses became at once startlingly apparent. From the 'interrupter' instrument corresponding exactly in duration to the assistant's touch of the key below, came three blinding flashes of blue-white flame, followed by a short flash, and then three more short flashes. The two side-mouths of the instrument likewise spout eye-blinding flame of the same colour and intensity. Simultaneously, the discharger, a few feet across the room, emitted similar blinding flames, and there came a wearing, tearing boom like the deep bass of some gigantic organ, but immeasurably cruder and louder. The duration of each note again corresponded exactly with the assistant's dot or dash on the instrument below. This was the electrical discharger, which sends oscillating electrical currents from the building into the aerial wires outside. These at once begin to set up vibrations of the ether, which in loops and waves travel with inconceivable rapidity across the sea."

The motivation here on the part of Canada was to break the submarine cable operators monopoly on transatlantic messaging. Marconi's commercial wireless service busted that monopoly. His first regular trans-Atlantic wireless service was established on October 17th, 1907 between Clifden, Ireland and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.  (An additional Marconi receiving station in Letterfrack, Ireland operated briefly from 1913 until 1917.)

Due to destruction caused by the Irish Civil War in 1922, traffic formerly carried at Clifden was permanently replaced via Marconi's new station at Ongar in Essex.  The first serious problems became in July.  On the night of Tuesday 25th, several buildings were set on fire and shots were fired. The receiving house was practically destroyed. There was also damage done to the condenser house. The staff were sent home. This wasn't an isolated incident; 14 homes had been burned in Clifden in 1921.

The station was never bought back into normal operation. The IRA irregulars held Clifden until August 15th, 1922 when they were forced out by the Irish Free State regular army. The last marconigram sent from Clifden, dated August 17, 1922. It announced the recapture of Clifden. The Clifden station then became a garrison for government troops. On November 29th the IRA took back the station only to be driven out again on December 9th. The contents of Clifden were sold for scrap to a Sheffield-based scrap merchant, Thos. W. Ward in 1925.

There's more info about this in the book Marconi: The Man Who Networked The World by Marc Raboy and also Richard Pine's book 2RN And The Origins Of Irish Radio.

Marconi in Bolinas, CA

Today it's just called the Marconi Station World Heritage Site.  The above image shows the Marconi transmitter during construction in Bolinas, CA. He had begun experimenting with radio in 1894. In 1909 he had won the Nobel prize in physics. By 1912, he had acquired either built or acquired 70 land-based radio stations.  One of these was KPH, the first radio station serving San Francisco, CA. More here.

In that image you can see the lines from bulldozers in the dirt radiating outward over the ground system that connects to a metal plate in a nearby stream bed. Zinc plates were buried under each corner of the building. Lines behind the structure are fill dirt over more ground wires that run over the bluff to a massive plate in the ocean. To the the east they extended under the transmitting antenna.  Like other Marconi designs the transmitter had nine 300 foot masts radiating a signal from a 230kW rotary spark gap transmitter. At Bolinas was the transmitting station. The receiving station KPH was about twenty miles further north in the town of Marshall, at Point Reyes. More here.

A radio service bulletin of 1916 listed his rates as follows:

• 25 cents per word.
• Lettergrams $1 for the first 12 words, each additional word 8 cents. 
• Weekend letters $1 for the first 24 words, each additional word 6 cents.
• The station only communicates with Koko Head T.H.

But in 1916 KPH wasn't yet in Bolinas. That construction was not complete. When Marconi bought KPH from DeForest, it was still operating from a hotel in San Francisco. It began operations at the Palace Hotel, but was forced out by the 1906 earthquake. It moved to Green Street, then Hillcrest in Daily City...  series of temporary homes. But in Bolinas and Point Reyes it had found a new permanent home from which it woudl broadcast for another 80 years.

During WWI Marconi lost KPH. The US government seized control over all radio communications. In 1919 the US Navy seized the Bolinas site. Despite his fame, Marconi was an Italian fascist, and an apologist for Mussolini. He joined Mussolini's Fascist party in 1923, and later joined their grand council. Mussolini was actually Marconi's best man at his second wedding. No exception could be made, not even for the man popularly believed to have invented radio.


Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed which bought the holdings of the American Marconi Company. RCA then sold the majority of undeveloped land around the site, retaining only 62.7 acres surrounding the station buildings. The national park service currently manages the property. In 2014 the Point Reyes, Marshall, and Bolinas area celebrated the centennial of the Marconi station with KWMR and the Cornish Amateur Radio Club. IT was quite an event. More here.

Flat Holm Radio: GB5FI

Flat Holm island has been inhabited since at least the Bronze age (900 BCE.)  Without delving into it's pre-history lets just agree it has a long and rich history. In 1897 it was the site of the first radio transmission, But today the 86-acre island and is just a nature preserve. The farmhouse where it occurred was probably first built by monks from St Augustine's Abbey sometime after 1150 ACE.

Flat Holm is a limestone island in the Bristol Channel about 4 miles off the coast of Lavernock Point. It is part of the most southerly point of Wales. Property records from 1542 show that King Henry VIII granted Edmund Tournor a lease to farm on the island. His family remains on the island into the 1600s. [Let's skip past the vikings and ahead to the 1800s so we can get to the bit about radio.] In 1835, clergyman John Ashley from Clevedon, England voluntarily ministered to the population of the island. He founded the Bristol Channel Mission. It was later renamed the Mission to Seafarers. A sanatorium was built on the island in 1896 for cholera patients. The new population of plague vectors did not dissuade Marconi.

On 13 May 1897, a now famous Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi, transmitted some of the world's first wireless signals from Flat Holm to Lavernock Point. Marconi was assisted by a Cardiff Post Office engineer named George Kemp and a Welshman named William Preece. They erected a 112 foot tall tower at Flat Holm and a 98 foot tower at Lavernock . The first attempts on May 11th and 12th failed, but on May 13th they added some height to the receiving tower at Lavernock increasing it's stature to 160 feet. The rest is radio history.

Now as a nature preserve the island has little in the way of radio. Just  GB5FI, which is operated by the Barry Amateur Radio Society on Flat Holm. It's set up annually on May 13th as a Special Event call sign to commemorate Marconi's broadcast there 118 years ago.

Marconi Rides Again!

This was a very recent and interesting re-discovery. On April 26, 1901 patent 777 was issued to Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company. This memorably numbered British patent was ambiguously titled "Improvements in Apparatus for Wireless Telegraphy."  It's more vague that manly criminally trolled software patents today. In 1904 the U.S. grated Marconi a matching patent numbered less memorably as 763,772. See above.

The patent is a difficult read even on a scale of 19th century electrical patents. It's a mix of wrong assumptions, archaic terminology and technically pedantic. But this one uniquely contains new and only inadvertently patented technology. Yes. Marconi drew, but did not describe a unique feature within the patent. Fixated on building coil configurations upon his prior patent 586,193 he missed something big.

At Cambridge, Gehan Amaratunga and Dhiraj Sinha led a group of engineers looking into that very detail. The drawing depicts a transmitter linked to an antenna which is connected to a coil. But the coil  had one end grounded (marked "E" for Earth) and the RF signal was clearly fed to the middle of the coil. That detail inspired Amaratunga's team to develop a way to reduce the size of a GHz antenna using dielectric material to emit radio waves.  More here. Early testing with piezoelectric films at 1575.42 MHz have already proved that the technique can be used to radiate 1 watt at 60% efficiency from a tiny chip.

Bear in mind how amazing this omission was. This patent was at the center of a legal dogfight back in 1900.  The patent addressed the endemic problem of RF interference. It resolved the issue by tuning all the primary components: coils, aerials etc. That's why the patent is so specific with the number of turns of wire in each layer on each coil.  There was no other way to tune a circuit at the time. However the solution was stolen directly from an 1897 patent held by Professor Oliver Lodge. Furthermore, Tesla patent 645,576, granted in 1900 described a four-circuit system for a transmitter and receiver with all four circuits tuned to the same frequency. In 1892 William Crookes first predicted tunable transmitters would be invented. He didn't predict that  Marconi would then steal it. More here. But my main point there is that three highly competent radio engineers looked that that configuration and didn't see what Amaratunga saw.

Previously it was not understood why or how a piece of dielectric material could radiate signals when a RF signals were applied at one end. It's completely counter-intuitive. All of our understanding began with 100 year old equations developed by Maxwell. The IEEE refers to the behavior as "asymmetric coupling between the spark generator and the antenna." It allows the transformation of the RF electric signal into electromagnetic radiation.  The concept is borrowed from quantum theory and it's the first explanation of how Marconi’s transmitter emitted electromagnetic waves over a century ago. More here.

World's Highest Radio Station

The etching reminds me of that iconic photograph "Lunch atop a Skyscraper" probably taken by  Charles Ebbets in 1932.  There postcard above dates to 1923. The idea behind the drawing seems lofty but there were already photographs of men on it's aerials published in Farm Mechanics Magazine later that year. They got it done. The caption here reads as follows:

"Dominating Brazil's beautiful capital and affording a magnificent panorama of the city and it's harbor, Mount Corcovado has hitherto served no utilitarian purpose. But a wireless plant will soon stand on it's summit, over 2,000 feet above the city. This sketch gives an idea of the hazards of the construction and the view offered from the world's loftiest radio station."

Mount Corcovado is actually 2,310 feet high and sits in southeast Brazil overlooking Rio de Janeiro. Today it's better known for the somewhat creepy concrete statue "Cristo Redentor" of Jesus Christ that sits atop the peak today. The statue was unveiled on October 12, 1931. But this too has a peculiar connection to radio history. In the opening ceremony, the statue was lit by a battery of floodlights turned on by radio control by Guglielmo Marconi, stationed 5,700 miles away in Rome (supposedly). So what happened between 1923 and 1931? 

First of all, prior to 1923 the summit wasn't exactly bare. Even in 1918 there was a rail road that went to the summit strictly for the benefit of tourists who wanted to take in the view. There was already at least one radio station SPY, whose call sign is ungoogleable today.  A third easily confused set of calls "SPE" was assigned to Praia Vermelha. So let's go back further... Brazil declared its independence from Portugal in 1822. They didn't get that in writing until 1925 but let's not mince words. To celebrate 100 years of independence they planned a centennial exposition, and they wanted to launch a new radio station over Rio de Janeiro as part of the event. They awarded a contract to Westinghouse, who shipped down the necessary equipment, men and materials and hauled it up the mountain on that aforementioned cog-wheel tourist railroad. More here.

Two 125 foot masts were erected and a 153 foot, 6-wire aerial for the 750 watt station. It was assigned the call letters SPC and operated on 450 meters. The inaugeral broadcast opened with a speech by President Pessoa. A telegraph line was run so it could broadcast speeches and operas from the city below. The station was originally planned to be temporary but it was so popular that it's life was extended. It was broadcasting as late as April of 1923. RadioWorld, Wireless Age and many other radio publications marked the debut of the station. More here.

But since 1920 a religious group called "Catholic Circle of Rio" had it's eyes on that peak. The group organized an event called Semana do Monumento "Monument Week" to collect money for the building of the statue. Construction supposedly began in 1922. It makes it difficult to account for the SPC broadcasts described in April of 1923. Regardless, the station was decommissioned by that Spring at the latest.

Marconi, and the KKK Pleasure Club

Construction of the Belmar station began in 1912 and continued into at least 1914. The site even had a 45 room hotel for "unmarried employees." It's not actually in Belmar, Belmar was just the nearest city of any note. It was actually in the township of Wall, NJ. the Belmar station was duplexed with his station in New Brunswick, so the radio operator in Wall keyed signals to the New Brunswick transmitter, 32 miles away via a land-line connection. According to a 1971 article in the Asbury Park Evening Press it was the last tower of what was once an array of 30:

"The first antenna consisted of six towers, each 300 feet high. Other towers were added later; some were made of wood and some of steel. The company abandoned the site in 1924, after other stations father north proved more efficient. The Army acquired the area in 1941 and subsequently tore down 28 of Marconi's towers"

That army base referred to above is Camp Evans, a base associated with Fort Monmouth. The camp is named after Lt. Col. Paul Wesley Evans of the U.S. Signal Corps. He worked at the Belmar Station in the early 20th century. (Evans was later a signal officer at the Panama Canal Zone.)

Let's rewind. In 1912 Public Law 264 was passed. It was an early attempt by the federal government to regulate radio. It permitted the President of the United States "...in time of war or public peril or disaster may cause the closing of any station for radio communication and the removal therefrom of all radio apparatus, or may authorize the use or control of any such station or apparatus by any department of the Government, upon just compensation to the owners." More here.

In 1917 they actually did so as a part of WWI. The Navy took over 53 commercial radio stations, most of them owned by the Marconi Co. Most of them were simply shuttered. In 1919 President Wilson allowed the return of the radio properties, effective 1 March 1920. The Navy thereupon manipulated the GE buyout of the American Maroni Co. thus creating RCA. That's relevant because at RCA Armstrong used the Belmar station for the development of FM. But they had no interest in maintaining the 396 acre site in perpetuity, and abandoned it in 1924.

This is how it came to be that in 1925 it was bought by the Klu Klux Klan. That hotel, and the main Marconi building served as state headquarters for the KKK from 1925 to 1932. The property was owned by the Monmouth County Pleasure Club. The Klan's Grand Dragon Arthur H. Bell  posted fliers in the area advertizing the facilities amenities: swimming, fishing, boating, golfing, tennis, and polo with the tag line "SPEND YOUR SUMMER WITH THE KLAN."  More here. There was a lawsuit regarding title to parts of the property and the mortgage was foreclosed and the building changed hands in a sheriff's sale.

It was bought in 1937 by Reverend Percy Crawford who intended to build a college but didn't. The US Signal corps bought most of the property and established the Evans Signal Laboratory which was used for radar development in WWII. Even in the early 1960s the Marconi towers were still being used to receive signals from weather satellites.

Nevil Maskelyne: Epic Troll

Nevil Maskelyne was the first troll in all electronic media.

 

It happened in June of 1903. John Ambrose Fleming was setting up a demonstration of the newest Marconi wireless device at the Royal Institution in London. He was supposed to receive a message from a transmitter in Chelmsford at an arranged time. Before he could begin, his machine began to tap out a message .-. .- - ... over and over.. it spelled R-A-T-S. But Fleming was nearly deaf, so the message continued to the amusement of the staff and spectators. Thanks to assistant Arthur Blok the event was recorded for posterity. Maskelyne was emboldened by the success and proceeded to tab out a bit of bawdy poetic verse.

There was a young fellow of Italy

Who diddled the public quite prettily

Maskelyne was largely self-taught in wireless technology. He had figured out that Marconis claims of true "Hertzian Syntony" were bunk. Maskelyne simply overrode the transmission with an untuned transmitter using a 10 inch induction coil. He knew that Marconi had been specializing in long waves so he used a shorter frequency to bleed in from any resonant frequency. Knowing the lecture began at 5:00 PM, he began his trolling promptly at 5:45 PM. In a word... tango down. More here.

Maskelyne  was a stage magician by trade and had learned Morse code to communicate with his hands during shows. He learned wireless gear well enough to make a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder.  In 1900, he sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. His ire for Marconi began with his excessively broad patents. It impeded him and other inventors working in early wireless. So he set up a 50 meter antenna near Porthcurno to snoop on the Marconi ship-to-shore transmissions. More here.

It was important that day that Maskelyne proved that wireless transmissions were not secure in any sense of the word. Fleming tried to claim later that Maskelyne had somehow cheated by using an earth ground that his interference was not "fair." But the truth was that those early tuned systems were totally vulnerable to the even earlier untuned or "dirty" systems.  Marconi had been trolled hard and lost. Fleming claimed that his instruments were configured in such a way that interference could not occur, but it did anyway. Editorials of the day gave some credit and praise to Maskelyn's legitimate criticism but others did not appreciate the crudity within their "sacred" institution. The book Scientific Credibility and Technical Standards by Jed Z Buchwald covers the event in great detail.

Maskelyn, Fleming and Marconi argued in the pages of a trade magazine called The Electrician for a couple weeks then in July, realizing that Maskelyne was indeed a troll, a troll of historic proportions. They ceased to respond to his further taunts and in the future they limited their public displays. In 1905 Fleming invented a more precise AC rectifier that was actually able to do what he'd claimed 3 years prior.

First Radio Signal on the West Coast

Radio history is very East Coast centric: DeForest, Armstrong, Fessenden.. etc. There was of course radio on the west coast. But in the short synopses we read in our school text books the furthest west radio travels is to KDKA, in Pittsburgh. The school books don't even leave East Coast time. But more specific texts such as The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977 by Gerald McKevitt describe even the first west cost broadcast in some detail.

"In 1899 a team of San Franciscans reproduced Guglielmo Marconi's method of communicating by radio waves and demonstrated its usefulness by sending a message in Morse code from a lightship anchored outside the Golden Gate to the Cliff House on the San Francisco Shore. This was the first wireless message broadcast on the West coast and the first ship-to-shore broadcast in the United States."

A month later Marconi himself came to America and repeated some of his now famous experiments. So their work preceded even Marconi's own demonstrations in the new world. That team of San Franciscans included father Richard Bell, a Jesuit priest and Professor John Montgomery. Bell had studied theology in the 1890s in Rome. While there he had become interested in the work of Marconi. Marconi's earliest experiments date to at least 1888. Bell was so interested in these that when he returned to California in 1898 he brought with him a copy of Marconi's published accounts. He began replicating the small-scale experiments almost immediately.

Bell began testing as early as 10 years after Marconi. Marconi did a quick U.S. visit in 1899 mostly around New york for the America's Cup race starting in Sandy Hook, NJ. He transmitted from the USS Ponce. He did not make it to the west coast. Bell continued his lectures and public experiments. In 1903 Bell and Montgomery made a 7-mile transmission from Villa Maria to college tower. Normally I'd double check that distance on a map but neither of those locations appear on any map. I suspect the locations are colloquial.

In 1906 Bell was promoted to head up both physics and chemistry at Santa Clara U. in the the Bruengo Science Building. Bell continued to experiment. He made transmissions from Los Gatos College to San Francisco, and later tackled voice transmissions with Dr. Charles Herrold. He and Herrold spoke the first transmitted words in the West coast. They were ahead of the Great White fleet by at least a year, who in California sometime in 1908. Bell for all his work patented only one device, a simple signaling unit he devised in 1928. In 1933 Marconi finally went to the west coast and visited Bell. (see image above.)  Bell is the grumpy looking cuss to the left.

Karl Braun rectifies

Yesterday I covered an improvement in crystal rectification. While it may seem crude, it was an advancement. And like any "break-through" it begat others, and was based in those that preceded it. I specifically noted Karl Braun. He is best known for invented the first cathode-ray oscilloscope in 1897. It's a big flashy invention with a fluorescent screen. But he also defined the basic principles of rectification, which while not as ostentatious was more important.

Rectification simply put is converting AC to DC. In radio this is a crystal detector, or a diode. Braun had been studying the conductivity of metal salts in solution, what we call electrolytes. he found that they conducted electricity even when not dissolved. He then made an examination of metallic sulfides. He discovered that in many metal sulfides the electrical resistance varies with the magnitude and polarity of the applied voltage. Viola! rectification. More specifically this was the "point-contact rectifier effect."

He went on to write a paper in 1874 on current flow through metallic sulfides. This was before radio, so it's implications were not immediately obvious to him. It was Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, who made that leap and applied to patent the idea in 1901. In the U.S. we teach that Marconi invented radio. In Germany I understand, they're a little better at mentioning that Dr. Braun shared that 1909 Nobel Prize for physics with Guglielmo Marconi for developing the "Wireless."

Unlike Losev, Braun was an academic. He'd even published scholarly articles while in high school. He attended the University of Marburg and earned his Phd at the University of Berlin in 1872. He taught physics at the University of Strasbourg. His career is well documented. But I find two different stories of his death. One tale tells of him defending his patents on his discoveries. In 1915 he traveled to New York City to go to court. the intimation is that he is defending a closed circuit design that improved upon Marconi's open circuit design. The other tale has him headed to New York to defend the German Telefunken wireless station at Sayville, N.Y. Defending it from none other than Marconi. I lean toward this second version as I can confirm that in 1915 said trial was at least extant.

Both stories end with him being detained because of his German citizenship. Unable to return home, he bought a house in Brooklyn, and died in April of 1918 without having ever returned to his homeland.

Everybody loves Guglielmo!

I've put off writing about Marconi for over a year. He's the main man of radio, but with all the contributors before and after, I am left wondering why he still gets top billing. There are thousands of pages written about the man, so I wont re-tell you his life story. But let me cover three major highlights that are usually skipped in his lionization. but first ... the obligatory introduction:

Many scientists and inventors contributed to the invention of radio, Oliver Lodge, Hans Christian Ørsted, Michael Faraday, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, Jagadis Chandra Bose, Alexander Popov, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Alva Edison, Nathan Stubblefield, to name a few...

But it was Marconi's practical system that first achieved widespread use, so gets the championship belt that reads "father of radio." Marconi made his first wireless transmission across water May 13th 1897, from Lavernock Point, South Wales to Flat Holm Island. His famous trans-Atlantic broadcast at Signal Hill in Canada was in 1901. But Marconi's system was based primarily on Nikola Tesla's system. His first test were based entirely on notes from lectures that Tesla had been giving in that era. Later revisions drew on the work of a contemporary radio geek David E. Hughes.

FACT: At the time his contemporaries thought that a radio wave could only be transmitted in the line of sight. No signal could travel between points beyond the curve of the earth. Marconi didn't buy into this. To silence critics he built a spark-gap transmitter to produce a signal with a frequency of approximately 500kHz and a power a peak pulse power of several tens of megawatts. To reach Newfoundland the signal would have to bounce off the ionosphere twice. The supposed success of the transatlantic attempt was recently contested by Dr Jack Belrose. Belrose is no crank, he actually went as far as to reenact the experiment. He believes that Marconi heard only random atmospheric noise and mistook it for the signal. This is pretty believable when you realize that the letter "S" was the message and that in more code that's just three dots. ". . ."

FACT: Marconi joined the Italian fascist party in 1923. Benito Mussolini made Marconi President of the Accademia d'Italia, which also made him a member of the Fascist Grand Council. This was no technicality. He insisted that his correspondence was addressed to "His Excellency the Senator Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, president of the Royal Academy of Italy, Member of the Fascist Grand Council". He attended pro-fascist rallys, wrote pro-fascist articles, made fascist speeches on the radio in a number of countries. Then in 1935 a greatly ironic turn of events, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, Marconi found himself [as a national of a country subject to sanctions imposed by the League of Nations] prevented from delivering a talk about the invasion on the BBC.. the broadcasting corporation he had helped to found. ...They don't teach that part in history class.
FACT : Marconi didn't know Tesla, but he did know David E. Hughes through a man named William Henry Preece. Sometime after 1896, Marconi befriended Preece, both of them were experimenting with transmissions across the Conwy estuary. This is the same site he would later transmit Morse code signals to Australia. Preeca had discovered radio induction while developing a telephone system in 1895. While Hughes did not intend to aid Marconi, Preece certainly did. Preece solicited financial assistance from the Post Office to help expand Marconi's work. He was one of Marconi's most ardent early supporters. More here.

the first transatlantic radio signal

All modern day telecommunications, including radio, TV, mobile phones and satellite can be traced back to this particular milestone of wireless communication.

The transmission site in Cornwall was chosen for its remoteness to keep the project out of the public eye and out of the newspapers. In 1900, Marconi decided to work in secret without the press hounding him or speculating on the outcome of his endeavor.

Originally Marconi had favored a site on Cape Cod. But including inclement weather forced him to move the receiving station to St. John's Newfoundland. As an added bonus, this was also 600 miles closer to Cornwall. Marconi send a message from Newfoundland to England, via the underwater telegraph cable, to tell the Poldhu transmitter to send radio signals between 12 noon and 3pm local time. more here.

On December 11th 1901 Marconi made the first attempt at a transatlantic transmission from Poldhu. He failed. He did not have the money for a full receiving array. Instead he was using a single wire aerial 550 feel long and 4 inches thick. That first day the wind was so strong that the balloon holding his aerial aloft was swept away. The following day a second was launched with the aerial attached and Marconi was finally able to hear the signal. It had traveled 1,800 miles.

He had sent and received radio signals before, even some over large distances. the question here was whether radio waves would be stopped by the curvature of the Earth. At 12:30 that day, Marconi heard "dot dot dot" [the Morse Code letter "S"]And got his answer. This was the start of a career that would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909.

Each year, hundreds of radio enthusiasts from all over the world make a pilgrimage to Poldhu to pay homage to Marconi. The ruins of the original wireless building that Marconi would have used are still on the site. It was dismantled in 1933, four years before Marconi's death.

Radio Pope causes cancer

The Vatican Radio's high-power antennas stand accused of causing cancer. How's that for unexpected? First of all with the glut of christian religious talk stations, its amazing the Pope still needs his own radio outlet. but apparently he does. The first signal to be sent out on HVJ was in Morse code. The technician types the words, In nomine Domini, Amen, that is In the Name of the Lord, amen! Marconi introduces the pope, somebody does the little dramatic two-note thing with some trumpets then Pius starts mumbling in latin. It was a pretty big deal. More here.It was Guglielmo Marconi himself who came to the Vatican in 1931 and kissed the popes ring. By February 12th of that year Pope Pius XI inaugurated the airwaves. Marconi was an Italian catholic, and Pius was originally from Milan. The two fervently religious men were both icons, and neither could have been more excited. they had been planning the event as early as 1925. The idea originated with the Dir. General of Communications for Vatican City, Giuseppe Gianfranceschi who drew up plans for a wireless station in the Vatican that year. Film footage of the event, which is conserved in the archives of Vatican Radio. That's a picture of Marconi and the pope hanging out below.
The size and number of the Vatican's antennas are imposing. Signals from two medium-wave transmitters reach all of Italy at all times, while those from 27 shortwave antennas are beamed at selected parts of the world in different languages at varying times. Thus, papal speeches, news programs, and religious events are dispatched in 34 languages to all the corners of the world, making this complex as important to the Vatican as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe were to the United States at the height of the Cold War.But to the inhabitants of Cesano and neighboring communities, the antennas, some transmitting at an effective 600 kilowatts, represent not only a blight on the landscape and something of a nuisance—hearing the Pope's voice picked up by your front-door intercom is not always appreciated—but also a possible health threat. About 6000 people live in the immediate vicinity.

In 2000, a small number of cases of childhood leukemia, first reported by a local physician, were blamed by residents on the strong radio-frequency fields generated by the Vatican antennas. Two scientific studies have suggested a field of Vatican Radio broadcasting antennas north of Rome may have caused high rates of cancer in the area. The first, in 2001, found that magnetic fields around the transmitters were much higher than normal limits allow. Finally in 2005 Cardinal Roberto Tucci and Father Pasquale Borgomeo of the Vatican were convicted of knowingly causing cancer in hundreds of children.

They were given suspended 10-day jail sentences, and the Italian court also ordered them to pay damages and court costs. The Vatican is appealing. Book on HVJ radio here.