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Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless telegraphy, arrived in Britain from Italy on the 2nd February 1896. Having failed to gain sponsorship from the Italian government to develop his ideas in wireless telegraphy, he had travelled to London to seek funds to convert his experiments into practical use. Marconi was not a stranger to Britain, as he had lived in Bedford with his Irish mother as a child and had British citizenship.

Physicist Sir Oliver Lodge had previously presented ideas on wireless telegraphy at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford in 1894, and bitterly complained that Marconi had “evidently got all his ideas” from a book that he had published after his lecture.¹ However, Sungook Hong argues that Lodge’s lecture had nothing to do with telegraphy and that “the image of Lodge as the inventor of wireless telegraphy was deliberately constructed by his friends and by Lodge himself”². Marconi was granted the first British patent for wireless telegraphy on 2nd July 1896.³

Marconi gained support from William Preece, Chief Electrician at the Post Office, who was impressed with his ideas. At a meeting at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September, Preece stated in his lecture that “an Italian had come here with a box giving a quite new system of space telegraphy”⁴ Members of the Association were indignant that Preece had overlooked British work and “taken up an Italian adventurer”⁵, particularly after Preece made the offer of financial support from the Post Office.

By March 1897, Marconi had succeeded in transmitting over a distance of 3 miles on Salisbury Plain, and then in May he sent his first wireless communication over water across the Bristol Channel.⁶ The scientific world longed to know what exactly Marconi’s “secret box” contained. Lodge bemoaned “the public has been educated by a secret box more than it would have been by many volumes of Philosophical Transactions and Physical Society Proceedings”⁷. Marconi formed his own private company, the Wireless Signal and Telegraph Company, on the 20 July 1897⁸

In September 1897, a team of experts from the Post Office conducted wireless telegraphy experiments with the Royal Engineers at Fort Burgogyne, Dover, under the direction of William Preece and Mr Gavey, the Chief Technical Officer.⁹ The apparatus was placed on a horse-drawn trolley and stations were set up at Swingate and St Margaret’s.¹⁰ Electrical power was taken from the local electricity works and the accumulators were sent down each night to the town to be changed.¹¹ Marconi had planned to conduct similar experiments at Salisbury a week later but had been alerted by William Preece that the Post Office planned to conduct the experiments at Dover. He wrote to Preece:

“In consequence to your letter, my experiments arranged to take place last week at Salisbury were postponed, you having suggested that I had better go to Dover. I now understand that the Post Office people have gone to Dover without me. Mr Gavey having told me in confidence that my presence cannot be permitted. At a board meeting of my company yesterday, much regret was expressed that the experiments at Dover are to be conducted in my absence with apparatus which may or may not be satisfactory.”¹²

Disappointed that he had been frozen out of the tests at Dover, Marconi, continued with his experiments, carrying out a series of tests at La Spezia for the Italian government, and some in Ireland. However, attempts to make contracts with the Royal Navy, Lloyds of London, and the Post Office initially foundered.¹³

On 30 January 1899, Marconi demonstrated his apparatus at the South Foreland Lighthouse, St Margaret’s Bay, to public officials and the press.¹⁴ His apparatus consisted of a 120 ft pole with a wire which was insulated to prevent interference stretched from the top of the pole to a transmitter and receiver in the corner of a little room in the lightkeeper’s house. This relayed to apparatus which had been set up at the East Goodwin Lightship, twelve miles away, where an operator was waiting in the cabin of the vessel.¹⁵ The event was arranged by Mr Hobbs of Ramsgate who had campaigned tirelessly for wireless communication between the lightships and the shore. ¹⁶

On the 17 March 1899, the East Goodwin Lightship sent its first wireless distress signal when Elbe, a merchant ship ran aground on the Goodwin Sands.¹⁷ The South Goodwin light vessel had fired a distress signal after the vessel had run aground on the south end of the Goodwin Sands. On hearing the signal, the East Goodwin Lightship sent a message to the South Foreland Lighthouse which sent telegraphic messages to the Kingsdown and Ramsgate lifeboats. The distress signal sent by the South Goodwin light vessel had already been heard by the Ramsgate lifeboat which was on its way, but the Town Council agreed that had the wind been blowing in the opposite direction, the distress signal might not have been heard in Ramsgate and that the wireless distress signal would have proved useful.¹⁸

Ten days later, with a thick haze enveloping the channel, morse code signals were sent from the engine house of the South Foreland Lighthouse to Chalet L’Artois, Wimereux, France, 50 km away.¹⁹ The newspapers reported that:

“Meteorological conditions have no effect upon the system. Yesterday and today it has blown very heavily in the Channel, but the signals were received just as sharply as in fine, bright, clear weather. Snow, fog, wind or rain – it is all the same.”²⁰

The demonstration was keenly observed by the Right Hon. C.T. Ritchie, President of the Board of Trade,²¹ as well as representatives of the French government.²² Messages in English and French crossed the channel all afternoon.²³ A description of the transmission was given as follows:

“It was interesting to watch the transmission of a message. Until the operator tapped the transmitting key the current was held in check in a short horizontal rod terminating with a brass knob. As soon as contact was made by the depression of the key a thick electric spark rushed with a loud cracking sound from one knob to the other and escaped into space off the pole outside the building, the effect being instantaneously recorded by the receiving instrument on the other side of the Channel.”²⁴

The rate of transmission was about 15 words a minute.²⁵

Afterwards, Marconi received letters of congratulations for his work. J.A. Fleming, Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College, London, visited the apparatus²⁶ and wrote to The Times calling for an end to the negativity that Marconi had received from the scientific community, arguing that:

“Signor Marconi has never hesitated to acknowledge that he has built upon the foundations laid by others, but a vast gulf separates laboratory experiments; however ingenious, from practical large scale demonstrations”.²⁷

However, at the beginning of April 1899, rumours began circulating that the electric waves between the South Foreland and Boulogne had interfered with the compasses of the Stella which foundered on Les Casquets rocks near the Channel Islands. Marconi, who was staying at Dover, negated the idea, arguing that he had performed experiments on the Royal Yacht Osborne, when the Prince of Wales was on board, without the compasses being in any way affected.²⁸ In fact, he believed that wireless telegraphy would become indispensable for all “men of war and mail steamers”²⁹

By now Marconi was receiving worldwide attention for his invention. On the 20 April 1899, he gave a demonstration of wireless telegraphy at the South Foreland Lighthouse to Cheng Yien Tao, the Naval Attache to the Chinese Legation in London, as the Chinese government were interested in adopting the system for the Chinese navy.³⁰ Just under a month later, a commisssion from the Dutch government came to visit and expressed their interest in adopting the system along their coast for defensive purposes, as well as for communication between lightships and the shore.³¹

That autumn, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) held their annual meeting at Dover Town Hall, where they witnessed a demonstration of wireless telegraphy.³² On the 16 August 1899, Mr Kemp, one of Marconi’s assistants, set up the wireless telegraphy apparatus at the Town Hall in preparation for the meeting.³³ Tests were made with four lightshipmen who had qualified as first-class operators assisting. Fears of the difficulty of transmitting through rock masses, buildings and other obstacles were allayed by an experiment in non-interference between the Dover Town Hall and the South Foreland. A signalling wire was attached to the 45 feet flagstaff, on the top of the 65 feet Town Hall tower.³⁴ Professor Fleming who observed the tests reported that:

“The immense mass of chalk cliff lying between the Town Hall, Dover and the South Foreland, appears to offer not the slightest obstacle to the passage of the ether waves to or from the wire attached to the Town Hall flagstaff.³⁵

Ten days later, the newspapers reported that “Signor Marconi has just returned from the naval maneouvres, and is on the eve of leaving for America, but before he goes he is anxious to superintend all the necessary arrangements for his demonstrations at the meeting of the British Association during the week’s meeting.”

At the meeting, English and French scientists were treated to a demonstration of wireless communication between Dover and Wimereux from an aerial on the top of the Maison Dieu.³⁶ Across the channel, in France, the French Society for the Advancement of Science were meeting at Boulogne, and both societies co-operated together and exchanged courtesies.³⁷

In 1900, Marconi formed Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Ltd.³⁸ The following year, the Royal Navy and Lloyds of London agreed contracts³⁹ and by December, 36 battleships carried the apparatus. The system was also adopted by the Italian, German and French navies.⁴⁰

Marconi continued to experiment and in 1902, he sailed from Dover on board the Italian cruiser Carlo Alberto which was bound for Kronstadt⁴¹ in order to conduct experiments from the ship to his station in Essex, including testing prototypes of the magnetic detector.⁴²

Marconi’s wireless telegraphy continued to have an important role in Channel communication. By 1903, the Admiralty Marconi stations connected Dover and Dungeness Point⁴³.

In 1909, messages recording Louis Bleriot’s flight across the channel were sent by Marconi’s wireless including one from Calais:

4.59 Calais: “Bleriot flew with perfect steadiness till out of our sight, not very high above the water. Let us know as soon as you see him”

5.52 Dover: “One of our representatives on Shakespeare Cliff saw Bleriot flying. He jumped into a motor car, raced over through Dover and picked him up at the North Foreland Meadow safe and sound. He is now in the Lord Warden Hotel, and has just started breakfast.”⁴⁴

It was this year that Marconi won the Nobel Prize for Physics.⁴⁵

During the First World War, Marconi served in the Italian navy, developing short-wave beam to send secret messages.⁴⁶ He returned to Dover in May and September 1925 in his yacht Elettra⁴⁷,taking part in an experiment of coded signals which was conducted near the Goodwin Sands.⁴⁸ Giorgio Dragoni wrote of his life “The entire world was his experimental laboratory, and he persevered with confidence in the experimental method, though he often struggled against the ‘official’ scientific opinion”. He died in Rome in 1937. His experiments in Dover were only a small but important part of his legacy.

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