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History See other History Articles Title: Marconi’s dubious Signal Hill feat being put to test Marconi’s dubious Signal Hill feat being put to test Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service Published: Friday, October 13, 2006 It’s a landmark event in Canadian history, a global communications milestone to rival Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone — but there is a growing controversy surrounding Guglielmo Marconi’s 1901 claim to have received the first transatlantic wireless message at St. John’s, Nfld. Now a group of radio experts from Canada, Britain and the U.S. is set to launch an experiment to determine whether the Italian inventor really did hear the famous “dot-dot-dot” that has made Signal Hill one of the country’s best-known tourist attractions. Using vintage technology to simulate Marconi’s equipment and conducting the test during an identical “sunspot minimum” to recreate the December 1901 atmospheric conditions for radio-wave transmission, the team is hoping to settle a debate sparked by doubting scientists during the lavish 2001 centennial celebrations to mark the supposed “Marconi Miracle.” “We’re trying to understand what actually happened in 1901,” said Joe Craig of the Marconi Radio Club of Newfoundland, which is working on the project with a sister organization in Poldhu, England — the Cornwall town from which Marconi’s historic signal was sent nearly 105 years ago. Wireless technology — the same communication system used today for cell phones and the Blackberry — was in its infancy at the dawn of the 20th century. And Marconi was among a handful of inventors racing to extend transmission distances and establish potentially lucrative networks of signal stations for shipping companies and other customers. Seated at a Signal Hill hospital room just after noon on Dec. 12, 1901 — a moment heralded by Marconi mythologizers as “the 12th hour of the 12th day of the 12th month” — the scientist claimed to have detected a three-click Morse code signal for the letter “S” that had been sent via a rudimentary spark transmitter from Poldhu. “On 12 December, the signals transmitted from Cornwall were clearly received at the pre-arranged times, in many cases a succession of S’s being heard distinctly,” Marconi would later report. He acknowledged, however, that “probably in consequence of the weakness of the signals and the constant variations in the height of the receiving aerial, no actual message could be deciphered.” In 2001, one of Canada’s leading radio scientists published a study challenging Marconi’s claim. Jack Belrose, an engineer with the federal Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, argued that Marconi’s equipment could not possibly have detected a signal from England and that what he probably heard were lightning flashes or click patterns that naturally occur in the ever-present crackle of atmospheric background noise. “As far as I’m concerned,” Belrose said at the time, Marconi “heard absolutely nothing. He deceived himself and the world into thinking he heard something.” Craig said Belrose’s “very persuasive” thesis and other recent studies have prompted radio enthusiasts around the world to increasingly question Marconi’s achievement. And even though there is no dispute that Marconi received a transatlantic signal in 1902 at a station in Glace Bay, N.S., the success of the Signal Hill experiment — celebrated in history books, on postage stamps and at the National Historic Site in St. John’s run by Parks Canada — is now widely doubted. Craig’s own view is that it was “probably unlikely, but not impossible” for Marconi to have received the Poldhu signal. Sunspot activity, he notes, could have been a key factor because the solar disturbances are now known — though not in Marconi’s time — to disrupt the ionosphere’s ability to reflect radio waves back to earth. By coincidence, Craig said, Marconi was conducting his Newfoundland experiment during a period when sunspot activity was at its lowest ebb in an 11-year cycle. The same sunspot minimum is occurring this fall and winter. The researchers are using a combination of old-fashioned devices — including a 165-metre wire receiving antennae — and advanced computer technology to transmit signals in the same way Marconi would have, but to record the transmission quality with modern-day precision. The experiment will begin in November and run through February to allow the team to gather the widest possible range of results. As in Marconi’s experiment, a Morse code message will be transmitted hourly, but this time the sender will repeat the letter “V” — dot-dot-dot-dash — to reduce the chance of random atmospheric clicks being mistaken for a message. Asked if he’s worried about producing results that cast further doubt on an iconic event in Canadian history and Newfoundland identity, Craig said science must ultimately determine whether Marconi’s feat was “too good to be true.” “And in the final analysis, we’re dealing with probabilities. I don’t think we’ll ever be absolutely certain about what happened.”
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