Guglielmo Marconi and his assistant George Kemp used a kite-borne antenna atop Signal Hill in Newfoundland to receive three faint clicks, the Morse code letter 'S', transmitted from a station in Poldhu, Cornwall, over 2,200 miles away. Many scientists had insisted radio waves could not follow the Earth's curvature; Marconi's feat proved wireless communication could span oceans and launched the age of global radio.
Marconi had been chasing the idea for over a year, believing that if radio waves could travel any distance at all, they could travel any distance, curvature of the earth notwithstanding. Skeptics scoffed, since radio waves were assumed to travel in straight lines and would shoot off into space over long distances rather than follow the planet's curve.
On the windswept clifftop of Signal Hill, Marconi and Kemp flew a kite nearly 400 feet high to lift their receiving antenna, battling gale-force winds that had already destroyed an earlier balloon antenna. Straining to hear through a telephone earpiece, Marconi reported hearing three faint dots, the letter S in Morse code, repeated over and over from the Poldhu transmitter.
The achievement had no independent verification at the time and was met with considerable skepticism, since no permanent written record existed of the actual signal. Regardless, within months Marconi had demonstrated more robust transatlantic transmissions, and by 1907 a regular commercial transatlantic wireless service was operating. The event effectively marked the beginning of global wireless communication, a technology that would prove indispensable in shipping, wartime communication, and eventually broadcast radio.
Key people: Guglielmo Marconi