The crackle that made history

• Main Author: Gratzer, Walter
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2002
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192804037.003.0166; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52577677/isbn-9780192804037-book-part-166.pdf

Abstract In January of 1891 Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the British Post Office, opined in a newspaper interview that ‘we have done as much with wireless telegraphy as is likely to be done’. Ten years later, on a windswept eminence in Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi clasped a telephone receiver to his ear and heard above the crackle of static a signal cast into the void at Poldhu in Cornwall 1,800 miles away. Preece had asserted—and many experts agreed with him— that ‘bridging the Atlantic’ was a pipedream, for ‘the curvature of the earth will send the waves out into space’. Preece, it must be said, seems to have enjoyed a remarkable record where prediction was concerned. When Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his first telephone Preece gave evidence before a committee of the House of Commons. His confident evaluation was: ‘Americans have need of this invention, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.’ (Americans, by contrast, were on the whole cautiously optimistic. ‘One day’, said the mayor of Chicago after witnessing a demonstration of the instrument, ‘there will be one in every city.’ A Senator, on the other hand, when told that Maine would soon be able to speak to Texas, riposted, ‘What should Maine have to say to Texas?’)