List of Marconi wireless stations


A list of early wireless telegraphy radio stations of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. Guglielmo Marconi developed the first practical radio transmitters and receivers between 1895 and 1901. His company, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co, started in 1897, dominated the early radio industry. During the first two decades of the 20th century the Marconi Co. built the first radiotelegraphy communication stations, which were used to communicate with ships at sea and exchange commercial telegram traffic with other countries using Morse code. Many of these have since been preserved as historic places.

Types of station

The first radio transmitters could not transmit audio like modern AM and FM transmitters, and instead transmitted information by radiotelegraphy; the transmitter was turned on and off rapidly using a switch called a telegraph key, creating different length pulses of radio waves which spelled out text messages in Morse code. Marconi used several types of station:

Coastal stations

Coastal stations communicated with wireless stations on ships, providing navigation and weather information and relayed communications from ships to other coastal stations and through telegraph systems. Ships were allowed to communicate on three frequencies: 500, 660, and 1000 kHz.

Transoceanic stations

Transoceanic wireless telegraph stations were large high powered stations with huge antenna structures, with output power of 100 kW to one megawatt. Industrial countries built worldwide networks of these stations to exchange telegram traffic with other nations at intercontinental distances and communicate with a country's overseas colonies. To achieve daylight communication at such long ranges they used frequencies in the very low frequency band, from 50 to as low as 15 – 20 kHz. They transmitted Morse code at high speed, 100 - 200 words per minute, using automated paper tape readers.

Australia

In 1906, Marconi constructed an experimental station at Queenscliff, Victoria, successfully communicating between Mainland Australia and Devonport, Tasmania. This station operated on a temporary basis; subsequent Australian wireless efforts would be undertaken by Amalgamated Wireless Australasia, established in 1913 under ownership of Marconi, its commercial arch-rival Telefunken and Australian local business interests.

Canada

The Marconi Company has owned or operated Canadian coastal radio stations since 1902, either as transatlantic radiotelegraph links or as marine radio stations. While eastern Canada's ship-to-shore coastal stations were government-owned after 1915, the Marconi Company had been paid to continue to operate the facilities. Canada's west coast had been served by government-operated stations since 1907; many stations in the Canadian Arctic were military operations.
The Canadian Marconi Company operated manufacturing facilities at Montreal, Quebec and in 1919 had established on an experimental basis the first commercial broadcast radio station, XWA. This operation would become CFCF and CFCX ; Marconi would be forced to sell the stations due to foreign-ownership restrictions imposed on Canadian broadcast stations in 1970. The manufacturing operations have now become Ultra Electronics TCS for tactical radio systems and Esterline CMC Electronics for avionic systems.
Since 1954, the federal Department of Transport has operated former Marconi coastal stations in eastern Canada; most served the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast:
On 15 December 1902 Marconi established transatlantic communication between Table Head in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia and Poldhu in Cornwall, England using a 60 kilowatt transmitter and four towers. The site was expanded and moved inland in 1904–05, increasing both antenna size and transmitter power. Transatlantic radio service between the Marconi Towers and Clifden, Ireland was inaugurated in October 1907, and continued until the Marconi station was shut down and the property sold in 1946. The site of the Marconi Towers station is now used to house a museum.

Halifax, Nova Scotia

In 1905, Marconi constructed a signal station at Camperdown, Halifax, Nova Scotia. From 1905 until 1926, this station was to collect traffic from Sable Island and Cape Sable for manual retransmission via dedicated landline telegraph circuit to Halifax. VCS later would serve as a coast guard marine radio station.

Louisbourg, Nova Scotia

As the original, powerful spark gap transmitters would create large quantities of electrical interference, stations could not transmit and receive at the same time - even if different wavelengths were used. By 1913, the increasing amount of transatlantic radio telegraph traffic required that existing half-duplex operation be upgraded to a link which could carry messages in both directions at the same time. This was done by geographically separating the receiving stations from the existing transmitter sites; new receiving stations at Letterfrack, Ireland and Louisbourg, Nova Scotia effectively doubled the capacity of the Marconi Company to carry transatlantic telegraph traffic. Instead of the 500 kHz and 1 MHz frequencies common in shipboard radio at the time, Marconi was to use longwave frequencies of 37.5 kHz for transmission from Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Letterfrack and 54.5 kHz for transmission from Clifden, Ireland to Louisbourg in order to establish reliable transatlantic communication day and night.
Antennas for longwave radio reception were to occupy huge amounts of land at these sites; while Lee de Forest's work had produced a vacuum tube as early as 1906, many key advances in electronic amplifiers would only be made once improved communications became a military necessity during World War I. The design and construction of tuned circuits able to separate radio signals transmitted and received at different frequency and wavelength had also shown great improvement.
By 1919, improved transmitting and receiving tubes had made transatlantic voice transmission possible. By 1926 Marconi would be able to use shortwave radio to link the British Empire, making the former long-wave transatlantic service and its Louisbourg receiving station obsolete. The Marconi Towers transmitter site on Cape Breton was upgraded to broadcast voice and operated until 1945; the Louisbourg station closed in 1926.

Pointe-au-Père, Québec

As the nominal point of entry to the St. Lawrence River from the sea, Pointe-au-Père has hosted four lighthouse stations since 1859. A Marconi radiotelegraph station was constructed in 1909. Arriving transatlantic liners would unload mail and take on harbour pilots; Pointe-au-Père also provided a hydrographic station and a quarantine post.
On 29 May 1914 the Pointe-au-Père Marconi station received an SOS call from the RMS Empress of Ireland, a Canadian passenger liner which, surrounded by fog, had been hit by Norwegian coal freighter SS Storstad. "May have struck ship... listing terribly" reported Marconi operators Edward Bamford and Ronald Ferguson, notifying rescuers on shore of their position twenty miles seaward of Rimouski as the vessel rapidly took on water. In 14 minutes, this collision was to claim 1,012 lives.

France

On 27 March 1899, Marconi transmitted from Wimereux, Boulogne, France the first international wireless message which was received at the South Foreland Lighthouse near Dover, United Kingdom.

Ireland

Ireland was, due to its western location, to play a key role in early efforts to send messages initially from ship to shore, and later for transatlantic messages.

Crookhaven

In 1902, a Marconi telegraphic station was established in the village of Crookhaven, County Cork, Ireland to provide marine radio communications to ships arriving from the Americas. A ship's master could contact shipping line agents ashore to enquire which port was to receive their cargo without the need to come ashore at what was the first port of landfall.

Clifden, Galway

As existing submarine cable operators in the early 1900s had held a monopoly on international telegraph service to Newfoundland, Marconi's first regular transatlantic wireless service was established on 17 October 1907 between Derrygimla Bog, Clifden, Galway, 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 redirected via Marconi's new station at Ongar in Essex, a link which remained in service until replaced by the Canadian shortwave beam circuit in October 1926.
On 15 June 1919, the first non-stop transatlantic aeroplane crossing by Capt. John Alcock and Lt. Arthur Brown left Newfoundland and made an unplanned landing at the Marconi site in Clifden, Ireland.

Ballybunion

Despite references in several publications, Ballybunion Station was not built by Marconi, and never operated commercially. The station was built by the Universal Radio Syndicate. Construction started in 1912, but the station had not obtained a commercial licence by the time World War 1 started. The company went into liquidation in 1915. A sister station at Newcastle New Brunswick, built to the same design as Ballybunion, suffered a similar fate. The Marconi Company bought the two stations from the liquidator in 1919, mainly to prevent their use by potential competitors. The stations were not idle in the interim, however, having been appropriated by the British Admiralty almost immediately upon outbreak of the Great War and kept in constant activity as key components of the allied communication system until the Armistice of November 1918.
The Marconi Company did not use the stations commercially, and it would appear that the Ballybunion station was only used briefly, in March 1919 for a successful telephony experiment with the Marconi station in Louisbourg, and for communication with the R34 airship in July 1919.
In March 1919, Marconi engineers H.J Round and W.T. Ditcham made the first east–west transatlantic broadcast of voice, using valve technology, from the Ballybunion station using the callsignYXQ. The first west to east voice transmission had already been achieved by Bell Systems engineers from the US Navy station at Arlington Virginia to the Eiffel Tower in October 1915.
The contents of Clifden and Ballybunion were sold for scrap to a Sheffield-based scrap merchant, Thos. W. Ward in 1925.