MARCONI HAD EXPECTED SOME SKEPTICISM about his Newfoundland success, but he was dismayed to find himself now confronting a barrage of incredulous commentary.
“I doubt this story,” Thomas Edison told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe it.” He said, “That letter ‘S’ with the three dots is a very simple one, but I have been fooled myself. Until the published reports are verified I shall doubt the accuracy of the account.”
In London that same day the
Two days later
But at least one longtime skeptic took Marconi at his word, and saw in his achievement a glimmer of threat.
ON THE EVENING OF MONDAY, December 16, 1901, as he dined at his hotel in St. John’s, Marconi was approached by a young man bearing a letter addressed to him. Marconi’s dinner companion was a Canadian postal official named William Smith, who was staying at the same hotel and had a room just off the dining room. As the young man crossed the room toward the table, Marconi was telling Smith that he now planned to build a permanent station on Newfoundland, most likely at Cape Spear, a spit of land that jutted into the sea four miles southeast of Signal Hill.
Smith watched as Marconi opened the letter. As Marconi read, he became distraught. When Smith expressed concern, Marconi passed him the letter.
Smith too found it appalling. The letter was from a law firm representing the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., the big undersea cable company that provided telegraph service between Britain and Newfoundland.
The letter was brief, a single long paragraph that charged Marconi with violating Anglo-American’s legal monopoly over telegraphic communication between Britain and Newfoundland. “Unless we receive an intimation from you during the day that you will not proceed any further with the work you are engaged in and remove the appliances erected for the purpose of telegraph communication legal proceedings will be instituted to restrain you from the further prosecution of your work and for any damages which our clients may sustain or have sustained; and we further give you notice that our clients will hold you responsible for any loss or damage sustained by reason of [your] trespass on their rights.”
Marconi was furious, but he took Anglo-American’s threat seriously. He knew his own company could not withstand litigation with so powerful a foe, and he recognized too that harm had indeed been done to Anglo- American, because of the decline in the price of its stock.
Smith asked him into his room, calmed him, and on impulse invited him—“begged him,” Smith recalled—to bring his experiments to Canada. (At this point Newfoundland was a colony of Britain; it did not join Canada until 1949.) Over the next few days Smith arranged a formal invitation from the Canadian government. Marconi relented and set off for Nova Scotia, part of Canada since 1867, to scout a new location.
A party of dignitaries met him at the wharf in North Sydney, at the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, and whisked him into a train for a brief trip south to Glace Bay to show him a spot called Table Head. Aptly named, it was a flat plateau of ice and blown snow atop cliffs striated with bands of blue-gray and rust that fell a hundred feet straight down to the sea. “The site,” Smith said, “delighted Marconi.”
He set off for Ottawa to negotiate a formal agreement with the government.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY two operators with Anglo-American Cable exchanged salvos of doggerel. One in Nova Scotia tapped out,
His counterpart in Liverpool responded,
North Sydney ended the exchange: