The Island Where Marvelous Marconi Turned ‘Carnival Showman’
Image: Secolo d’Italia
Guglielmo Marconi is famous for sending the first transatlantic wireless signal from Cornwall to Newfoundland, with his two radio stations on the Lizard peninsula covered by a previous Geek’s Guide. But he worked up to this achievement on the Isle of Wight, the England-in-miniature that lies just off the south coast of Hampshire.
Marconi’s Needles wireless telegraph station existed for just two and a half years, but its location on Alum Bay at the west end of the Isle of Wight is marked by a built-for-the-ages stone monument. Plaques on each of its four sides tell the story of how between December 1897 and May 1900 the Italian tech entrepreneur and his staff carried out pioneering experiments in wireless communication.
They exchanged radio messages with Bournemouth and Poole, 14 miles (22.5km) and 18 miles (29km) away respectively, then ships 40 miles (64km) away. On 3 June 1898, Lord Kelvin helped monetise the technology by sending the first paid-for radio telegram. On 15 November 1899, the contents of the Transatlantic Times, the first newspaper produced at sea, were sent from here to the American liner St Paul.
The station was actually a sitting room at the Royal Needles Hotel with a hole drilled through its window connecting the kit to a 168-foot mast outside. The hotel, window and mast have gone, replaced by the Needles Landmark Attraction, a collection of rides, sideshows and shops next to an enormous car park. Marconi’s monument is tucked into a corner of the site, surrounded by a semi-circular stone bench and a platform looking across the Solent towards Bournemouth and Poole.
Image: SA Mathieson
Its dignity is arguably undermined by the proximity of a tea cup ride, a dinosaur-themed crazy golf course and the Dino Jeep Safari, which features regular smoke eruptions and roars that sound disconcertingly like Jurassic farts. But Marconi had a streak of the fairground barker in him. He worked hard to develop wireless technology, from initial experiments at his childhood home near Bologna in 1895 to his epoch-making transatlantic signal in 1901.
He worked at least as hard to promote, organise and commercialise radio telegraphy. Marc Raboy, in his 2016 biography, describes him as “the consummate networker… Marconi’s greatest invention was himself.”
Hobnobbing with royals and a helping hand to the hacks
Alum Bay was the site of several examples of self-promotion. In January 1898, Prime Minister William Gladstone, whose health was failing, was in Bournemouth pursued by death-watch reporters. A snowstorm cut the telegraph lines to the resort so Marconi set up a wireless link across the Solent to Alum Bay, which had telegraph links, to help the gentlemen of the press. In the event Gladstone survived Bournemouth, dying that May in northeast Wales.
The Isle of Wight also let Marconi link up with the royals. Queen Victoria spent much of her time at Osborne, a spectacular Italianate palace she and her husband Prince Albert had rebuilt decades earlier, which is now open to the public.
In summer 1898, her son the Prince of Wales got Marconi to set up a wireless link between his yacht and Osborne so he could send Her Majesty updates on the state of his injured knee. “HRH the Prince of Wales has passed another excellent night and is in very good spirits and health. The knee is most satisfactory,” ran one deeply personal communication.
The Needles Landmark Attraction is fun and its Marconi’s Licensed Tea Rooms includes vintage radios and information about his life. But it is easier to understand the value of Alum Bay from either its beach – reached by steps or a chairlift – or from the Needles headland, a decent walk uphill from the car park. Both have superb views of the Hampshire and Dorset coasts, including of individual buildings in Bournemouth, which seems less distant than its actual 14 miles (22.5km).
But even from the top of the headland you can’t see the Lizard in Cornwall, some 180 miles (289km) away and well below the horizon. If wireless needed a line of sight to work, Marconi would have needed a mast several miles high – and that is what makes what happened next so important.
Working remotely
In 1900, with the proprietor of the Royal Needles Hotel wanting to increase his rent, Marconi moved operations to Knowles Farm at St Catherine’s Point, the southernmost tip of the Isle of Wight.
Image: SA Matheison
The most direct route, the Military Road along the southwest coast, is the island’s answer to California’s Highway One, with dramatic cliffs and awesome beaches such as Compton Bay. Plus, it has a shop selling pearl jewellery and really good cream teas.
After about 15 miles (24km) and a steep hill, Military Road reaches the quiet village of Niton, with St Catherine’s Point just to the south. There is neither chairlift nor direct road access to the site unless you decide to rent Knowles Farm from the National Trust for a holiday.
There is a free Trust car park at the end of Old Blackgang Road up the hill with a circular trail taking in the farm while those taking the bus should get off at the Buddle Inn stop. In both cases, expect a pleasant walk down and a steep hike back up.
Knowles Farm is a peaceful, if windswept, place by the sea and the island’s only onshore lighthouse. It was here that Marconi beat the horizon, making wireless communication something that could cross oceans, when at 4:30pm on 23 January 1901 he successfully transmitted a signal that was picked up by his Lizard station after bouncing off the ionosphere.
The achievement is recorded by a National Trust sign and a stone plaque built into the landward side of one of the farm buildings. It is also noted by one having the name “Marconi Cottage”, incongruously illustrated by a badger. But if you want to find the exact place where it happened, you will need to search in a field just to the south, between the buildings and the coastline.
Image: SA Mathieson
The mast was chopped down in the 1920s, apparently to make ladders, but the concrete base of Marconi’s aerial remains. It isn’t signed but it is fairly easy to find: about a metre across and octagonal in shape with weeds growing out of its middle. It lacks a stone monument, a car park or a dinosaur ride, but it is in this corner of a seaside field that wireless really took flight.
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Dennis
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After Marconi transmitted a wireless signal from North America to the UK – an aide informed Queen Victoria that.”people could talk to each other between America and England.”
She responded by saying,”Yes, but what will they say to each other.”
Today, most international calls are mostly banal chatter.
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Binra
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Tesla listened in on radio frequencies as if the first – and seeking to understand the nature of what we now may call and Electric Universe.
He picked up a definite signal that he had no reason to believe came from terrestrial sources and in the milieu of the times presumed to be from life believed to be on Mars.
Marconi had conducted a secret experiment with the Royal Navy in transmitting the letter S as morse code. Tesla inadvertently overheard the ‘secret’ communication but misinterpreted it. My interest is that right from the start communications have always shared or been picked up in ways that are not necessarily recognised for context.
Another facet is the association of ‘sickness’ with EM. Firstenberger loves seeing this almost to exclusion of all else, but I recall Isle or Wight featuring in his history of associated sickness with new exposures to either man made RF/EMF or to proximity with such.
I picked up the first anecdote in a book about Tesla called Wizard – which revealed a number of interesting asides that cast more light than might seem on the events and milieu of the time.
The degradation of communication may be linked to the recognition that it is used to limit, distance, filter and mask intimacy. It may begin with a true Word, but is then taken in vain, to serve image and form as things in themselves for a sense of ‘self-in-itself’ – but this is where the channel of innate relational being and its extension is blocked by a mind that becomes identified within its own thinking – as a protected circle set as defence against the Field of Communication that Always Already Is – of which we are an integral expression even if tooled to the experience of conflict, denial and masking in acquired conditioned defences that ‘map’ a model of the past as our current limits/reality.
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Joseph Olson
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Tesla patents for radio sat in the US patent office for four years while Marconi cabal planned the theft.
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