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Around the wireless station is a network of posts, wires, and lower towers. Poldhu was chosen in 1900 as the site of a station for the purpose of establishing communication by wireless telegraphy with America, Mr. Marconi being assisted at that time by Professor Fleming, of London. No such distance had hitherto been attempted, and the employment of very powerful magnetic waves was necessary.
His transatlantic triumph came on the 12th December 1901 when the morse letter 'S' was transmitted from Poldhu, in Cornwall and received by Marconi himself at St. John's, Newfoundland, who recorded the historic event in his pocket book simply "Sigs at 12.20, 1.10 & 2.20". The operation of Marconi's transmitter was itself quite spectacular.
A little river flows into the Poldhu cove, running down from the charming wooded estate of Bochym, mentioned in Domesday as Buchent. There was formerly some fine old tapestry and stained glass in the mansion, but these have gone; however, its oak room with sliding panel and secret staircase remains, and the garden has some remarkable tropic growths.
It was 12:30 o'clock on the American side of the ocean, and Marconi had ordered his operator in far-off Poldhu, two thousand watery miles away, to begin signalling the letter "S" three dots of the Morse code, three flashes of the bluish sparks at that corresponding hour.
Various improvements from time to time were made in the aerial wires, and in 1905 a number of horizontal wires were connected to an aerial of the inverted cone type previously used. The directional aerial with the horizontal wires was tried at Glace Bay, and adopted for all the long distance stations, affording considerable strengthening of the received signals at Poldhu stations.
To Marconi it was the simple carrying out of his orders, for he said that he had fitted the Poldhu instruments to work to two thousand one hundred miles, but to those who saw the thing done saw the narrow strips of paper come reeling off the recorder, stamped with the blue impressions of the messages through the air, it was astounding almost beyond belief; but there was the record, duly attested by those who knew, and clearly marked with the position of the ship in longitude and latitude at the time they were received.
A magnetic detector was devised by Marconi while other inventors had contrived electrolytic, mercurial, thermal, and other forms of detector, used for the most part with a telephone receiver in order to detect minute variations in the current caused by the reception of the electro-magnetic waves. With one of Marconi's magnetic detectors signals from Cape Cod were read at Poldhu.
Then the ship could talk no more, her sending apparatus not being strong enough; but the faithful men at Poldhu kept sending messages to their chief, and the recorder on the Philadelphia kept taking them down in the telegrapher's shorthand, though the steamship was plowing westward at twenty miles an hour.
Thus it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula. It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grim humour of my patient.
In December, 1902, regular communication was established between Glace Bay and Poldhu, but it was only satisfactory from Canada to England as the apparatus at the Poldhu station was less powerful and efficient than that installed in Canada. The transmission of a message from President Roosevelt to King Edward marked the practical beginning of trans-Atlantic wireless telegraphy.
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