MARCONI
Herz died in 1894 and later the same year Sir Oliver Lodge, a British scientist, gave a lecture in his memory. He demonstrated some of Herz's experiments and showed that the wireless waves could even pass through stone walls. From then onwards, inventors and scientists tried to find ways of using these electrical waves to send or transmit wireless messages in the dots and dashes of the Morse Code. One of them was a young Italian called Guglielmo (William) Marconi. He was able to send waves thirty feet across his room to make an electric spark hump across a gap. Next he used wireless waves to ring a bell in another room. Marconi was then ready to try his experiments outside, to discover whether the electrical waves could carry a signal a long distances. He found his results were better when he placed his equipment higher. So he placed his apparatus to receive the signal, the receiver, on a hill at the bottom of his father's garden at the Villa Grifone at Pontecchio in Italy. Her he put up the first wireless aerial mast with help of two broomsticks. (sounds familiar to Ham's) Marconi tapped out a message on his transmitter in the house, and his brother waved a flag to signal he had received the message on the receiver. By 1895 Marconi had transmitted electrical waves a distance of one and half miles. The following year he came to London to get help, There he met William Preece, the Chief Engineer of the Post Office. Marconi was invited to set up his apparatus on the roof of the G.P.O. at St. Martin's-le-Grand. From there he sent signals to a receiver on the top of another building, a few hundred yards away. The Post Office decided to help Marconi and he was invited to carry out tests on Salisbury Plain. There he transmitted messages one and a half miles in front of the Navy, Army and Post Office officials. At the same site in March 1897, Marconi sent signals four and a half miles using kites. Two months later, however, Marconi flashed his signal using Morse Code from Lavernock Point near Penarth in South Wales to the island of Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel, three and a half miles across water. Later, signals were sent as far as Brean Down, in Somerset, nearly nine miles away, "The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company" in 1897 was set up to develop his work. The first wireless station in the world was built at Alum Bay near the Needles, on the Isle of Wight. Broadcasts were made to a small steamer going along the south coast and distances of up to 18 miles. Then a few months later a second station was opened up at Bourmouth and signals sent between the two. This was known as the Marconi -gram June 3rd 1898, Later that year the second station was moved to Haven Hotel at Poole. In 1900 the Company name was changed to "Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company Ltd." The next was to try across the Atlantic and required to go two thousand miles from Poldhu in Cornwall and his transmitter had to be one hundred times more powerful than he had previously made. Marconi himself, his two assistants, Kemp and Paget, set off for St.John's, Newfoundland. The letter "S" was sent at regular intervals from Poldhu and on Dec 12th,1901, the signal was faintly heard on the other side of the Atlantic. A year later the signals went the other way so that now signals had gone both ways. Later ship to shore communications came about using the S.S. Philadelphia up to two thousand miles away. Next in 1904 Ambrose Fleming, who helped Marconi on several occasions, invented the wireless valve. Two years later, Lee de Forest added a mesh called a grid the first triode valve. In 1910, wireless helped to arrest a murderer called Crippen on the Liner Montrose...........G3RFL