On the  first weekend of July, 1974, I went with my wife and our  two sons to visit St.  John’s,    Newfoundland , Canada .   I went there because of the history of discovery and codfish connected with the Portuguese navigators and fishermen.

The sign on route 6 indicating to Marconi Station

While at St. John’s seaport,  I learned about the hill, on the north part of the entrance of the harbor,  where Marconi got his  first reception of wireless message  from  England to that part of North America .

Marconi and one of his assistants reading a message in Morse at the Cape Cod, 1901	The Antennas - The wireless station transmitting and receiving at South Wellfleet, Cape Cod, in 1901. The columns made of wood are over 200 feet in height.

When I was in Canada  I also learned of existence of another wireless station Marconi built at Cape Cod. When we returned to U. S. A. , I made my business to visit it  with my family.

Last week my wife and I spent a week on the Cape Cod region and after visiting Provincetown. We stopped at the Marconi Wireless on the Cape Cod to see what still existed, and to get some photos of the local and the Museum that stores some of the electronic tools that Marconi used. 

Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor and an electrical engineer who developed the technique of wireless or radio. He got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909 together with the German Karl Ferdinand Braun who developed cathode-ray tube.

Marconi’s discovery of the radio is a true example of determination and perseverance in getting  his main objective.  He became much admired all over the world and when he died in 1937, all the radio stations in  the world kept a silence of two minutes in his honor.   With the radio, television, Internet, outer space  communications, even today,  we should pay homage to Marconi’s genius! 

The remnants of some of the columns of the wireless station. My wife Silvia for human comparison	Some brick remnants of the building of the wireless station

 

The cliffs are over 200 feet. And within  one hundred years,  the sea has taken  more than 300 feet of the shore  near the wireless station.

Part of the transmitting material used by Marconi kept at the Museum of Cape Cod National Seashore Headquarters.	Parts of receiving apparatus of the wireless station used by Marconi, at the Cape Cod Station,  exposed to the  public at  the  Museum of Cape Cod National Seashore Headquarters.