Marconi Opens Transatlantic Wireless: 1907
Guglielmo Marconi's company launched the first commercial transatlantic wireless telegraph service on October 17, 1907, linking Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, with Clifden, Ireland. Messages cost ten cents a word with a ten-word minimum. Before this, transatlantic communication required undersea cables that cost millions to lay and broke regularly, or physical mail that took over a week by steamship. Marconi had proved wireless telegraphy could cross the Atlantic in 1901 with a single Morse letter 'S' received at Signal Hill, Newfoundland. Turning that experiment into a reliable commercial service took six more years of engineering. The first paying customer sent a message to London that arrived in seventeen minutes. Marconi won the Nobel Prize in Physics two years later in 1909, sharing it with Karl Ferdinand Braun.
October 17, 1907
119 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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