inland from the Atlantic to allow him to transmit across the ocean. Guglielmo visited different places along the Canadian coast accompanied by the Canadian personalities of the day. It was still winter. The weather could not have been worse; snow, rain and strong winds reduced visibility almost to nothing. In the month of March, 1902 he finally found the most suitable geographic position to install a new radio station on the island of Cape Breton at Table Head a locality situated a mile away from Glace Bay which received great economic benefits from this, changing it from an agricultural town to an important commercial centre.
The radio station at Table Head became larger and three times more powerful than the one at Poldhu. All the radio stations were built on the Atlantic coasts and were thus always exposed to the danger of storms and winter gales. The unfavourable climate was one of the greatest problems for the radio stations. Guglielmo regularly sailed across the ocean to check that everything worked and to improve the transmissions; the yacht’s radio station became his own personal laboratory. In this way he maintained the long-distance contact between the transmitting and receiving stations, built on two promontories on either side of the Atlantic.
Guglielmo told me that his life at that time was particularly busy; he personally supervised the building of the new radio stations, just as he chose all his assistants himself. He was full of optimism and enthusiasm and he did everything he could to inspire the same feelings in the people who helped him. Mr. Vyvyen worked for a long time in Canada; he was in charge of the radio stations during Guglielmo’s absence. In an article he wrote about my husband, he said: “Only those who have worked with Marconi throughout these four years realize the wonderful courage he showed under frequent disappointments, the extra-ordinary fertility of his mind in inventing new methods to displace others found faulty, and his willingness to work, often for sixteen hours at a time, when any interesting development was being tested.” One of Guglielmo’s characteristics was his ability to choose the right person for each job. He and Vyvyan worked together hour after hour at the Poldhu, Clifden and Table Head radio stations. Guglielmo was known as an approachable person who had faith in those who worked for him. He thought sincerity was very important, but he was also sensitive enough to know when it was better to keep quiet.
Here, by the way, I should like to mention that Guglielmo spent the summer of 1902 on board the ship, the Carlo Alberto. Sailing between Russia and North Africa, he carried out tests on the “magnetic detector”, a technological jewel he had invented which was unaffected by the ship’s movement but so sensitive that it could pick up even the faintest electric waves. In October of the same year he was once again on board the Carlo Alberto, which was to take him from England to Cape Breton in Canada. He perfected his magnetic detector while he was in constant contact with Poldhu. When he arrived in the town of Glace Bay he was met by a myriad of boats and hundreds of people who had come to welcome him, including his loyal assistants, Mr Kemp, Mr Paget and Mr Vyvyan. The Carlo Alberto continued its voyage and anchored in the port of Sydney; here, too, Guglielmo was received with great enthusiasm and gratitude by the local press and by the members of the Sebastian Cabot Society, an important Canadian association.
Canada still feels a debt of gratitude to Guglielmo because his invention gave work to the inhabitants of the island of Cape Breton both to guarantee the constant functioning of his radio stations and to construct and perfect the equipment he invented. For his part, my husband was grateful to the Canadian government and the people of Cape Breton. When he spoke to me about those years, Guglielmo made me feel the great emotion he had felt every time he crossed the Atlantic and admired the natural beauties of the Canadian coasts when they were lit up by the summer sun.
In January, 1903 Marconi arrived on Cape Cod where the South Wellfleet station had been rebuilt with a new set of towers supporting a “V” shaped aerial, modelled on the ones at Poldhu and Table Head. He established a radio link to send messages from the Cape Cod station to Poldhu via Table Head and viceversa. In spite of the bad winter weather, on 19th January1903 Guglielmo successfully transmitted a message from President Roosevelt to King Edward VII. The signal from Poldhu acknowledging reception of the message did not come back to Cape Cod via Table Head as expected but directly from Poldhu to Cape Cod.
The President’s message read:
His Majesty, Edward VII
London, Eng.
In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and all the people of the British Empire.
Theodore Roosevelt
Wellfleet, Mass., Jan.19, 1903.
The reply from the King came back:
Sandringham, Jan. 19, 1903
The President,
White House, Washington, America
I thank you most sincerely for the kind message which I have just received from you, through Marconi’s trans-Atlantic wireless telegraphy. I sincerely reciprocate in the name of the people of the British Empire the cordial greetings and friendly sentiment expressed by you on behalf of the American Nation and I heartily wish you and your country every possible prosperity.
Edward R. and I.
My husband enjoyed telling me about that time when he was young, when the new radio service on ships also began. Cunard was the first shipping company which had confidence in him and agreed to his proposal to install it on their transatlantic liners. This was a success for Guglielmo as a businessman and profitable for the Marconi Company.
In 1905, six miles from Table Head and a little further inland, he set up another radio station which was given the name of “Marconi Towers”. The spectacular sight of this larger and more powerful radio station could be admired from at least fifty miles away. In the same year Guglielmo also began work on a new radio station at Clifden in Ireland to communicate with Cape Breton. The site he chose was on a plain near the beautiful Atlantic coast of Connemara in south-west Ireland. It was well-equipped and more powerful than the one at Poldhu, although less so than the station at Coltano, the most important one, which was in Italy near Livorno. The Clifden station was inaugurated on 15th October1907 when a successful radio transmission with Glace Bay was carried out. Guglielmo was particularly pleased by the success of the Clifden station since Ireland was his mother’s native land.
In February, 1908, Guglielmo started a permanent commercial radio service. From that moment he began an activity that he knew he could extend all over the world. He told me that the following year a fire broke out at the Glace Bay radio station caused by the excessively high tension. Fortunately, there were no victims. Guglielmo stayed there for many months, supervising the reconstruction personally, making it safer and installing more efficient and powerful machinery. In 1913, twelve radio-telegraph operators were sent to the new radio station at Louisbourg, built by Guglielmo once again on the island of Cape Breton. In 1919 in a radio broadcast from Ireland, the human voice was heard for the first time at Louisbourg.
At the beginning of the First World War, Guglielmo was in Canada; he returned to Italy to put himself at the disposal of the army as a volunteer, offering his help to improve the radio transmissions. He was given the rank of captain. Guglielmo often spoke to me of the time in 1919, immediately after the end of the war, when he was sent by the Italian government to the Versailles Peace Conference as a member of the Italian delegation. The Conference had the task of drawing up the official peace treaty between the principal victorious nations (Great Britain, France, Italy, USA and Japan) and the defeated ones (above all, Germany, which was to suffer extremely harsh terms) in the great war which had just ended.
The Italian delegation was led
