The Story of Information

On this day in 1900,  Reginald Audrey Fessenden said into a microphone: “Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If it is, telegraph back.” His voice, radiated from a 50-foot antenna on Cobb Island in the Potomac River, Maryland, to another 50-foot antenna a mile away. The sound was rough, but Professor Thiessen heard well enough to telegraph back that it was indeed snowing. According to Harold Evans in They Made America, when Fessended asked Thomas Edison, some 20 years earlier, what he thought of the possibility  of broadcasting voices, Edison answered: “Fezzie, what do you say are man’s chances of jumping over the moon? I think one is as likely as the other.”

Today in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in transmitting the letter “S” (in Morse code) via radio telegraph from a transmitter at Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to a receiver in Newfoundland. There was no independent observer present and there were many skeptics. To prove them wrong, the next February, Marconi documented well the transmission of signals from the Poldhu station to the SS Philadelphia hundreds of miles away. But as Steven Lubar notes, “there wasn’t much of a market for transatlantic wireless telegraphy because transatlantic cables could do the job better. At the turn of the century, there were twelve telegraph cables operating across the Atlantic, carrying more than 25 million words a year at about twenty-five cents a word.”