a bluff from Marconi?

On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi deploys kites in the sky. Antennas are attached to it. We are on top of a hill in Canada, Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland. “Marconi, with one of his assistants, claims he detected the letter S in Morse code”, says Pascal Griset, historian of innovations. The signal was sent from the station the engineer set up in England, more than 3,000 km away: Poldhu, in the south of the county of Cornwall. “His enemies, who are numerous, will accuse him, not of deception, but of lying because he is the only witness in this affair with his assistant”, continues Pascal Griset.

“This is a date that is one of the great controversies in the history of telecommunications. It’s really hard to remember it as a proven first.”

Pascal Griset, historian

to franceinfo

Even if specialists doubt its success that day, the date goes down in history. “In January 1903, some time later, there will be the first exchange of messages by wireless telegraphy between Edward VII and Theodore Roosevelt which, there, attests the reality and the effectiveness of his connection”, explains the historian. For this major innovation, the Italian businessman receives the Nobel Prize in physics, which he shares with Karl Ferdinand Braun. Guglielmo Marconi is barely 35 years old and already a thriving business. “Its first market is to equip boats with its transceiver stations, Explain Pascal Griset. But it also has the ambition to compete with submarine cables on the market which is the juiciest. The United States-Europe traffic represented a quite considerable mass of communications at the time. “

Very quickly, we went from telegraphy with Morse code to radio. Marconi was also next to Pope Pius XI in 1931 during the inauguration of Vatican Radio.
And 70 years after the first transatlantic transmission, it is the electromagnetic waves that allow communication with the Moon that allow us to hear Neil Armstrong say his famous: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind “.