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"Wavescan" is a weekly program for long distance radio hobbyists produced by Dr. Adrian M. Peterson, Coordinator of International Relations for Adventist World Radio. AWR carries the program over many of its stations (including shortwave). Adrian Peterson is a highly regarded DXer and radio historian, and often includes features on radio history in his program. We are reproducing those features below, with Dr. Peterson's permission and assistance.
Wavescan N656, September 19, 2021
The Early Wireless Scene on Three Islands off the Coast of Wales - Part 1
In our opening feature here in Wavescan today, we present Part 1 in our investigation of the early wireless scene on three separate islands, all tourist related islands, that are located off the northwest coast of the country of Wales in islandic Europe. These three islands are identified as Holy, South Stack, and Anglesey, and we begin with the Marconi wireless scene at Holyhead on Holy Island back in the year 1901.
Holy Island is a small island measuring just 8 miles by 4 miles and it lies off the west coast of the larger Anglesey Island, though it does have quite a large resident population of some 14,000 people. Large numbers of tourists visit Holy Island each year, some for a vacation on the island itself but most in transit through the port of Holyhead to Dublin in Ireland, some 67 miles due west across the Irish Sea. The very irregular, and in some places very narrow, Cymyran Strait, separates Holy Island from Anglesey.
During the month of May 1901, the Marconi trained wireless operator, David S. Davies, installed English Marconi made equipment in a separate building at 66 Queen's Park, Holyhead on Holy Island, together with a tall 400 ft mast. This wireless station was installed to enable communication with shipping that was entering or leaving the nearby Port of Liverpool.
On May 21 of that same year, 1901, the one year old cargo/passenger liner SS Lake Champlain, with its new wireless equipment, attempted Morse Code communication with the equally new Marconi wireless station at Rosslare at the southeast corner, shall we say, of the island of Ireland. The SS Lake Champlain was operating with the Beaver Line Service, transporting European migrants from continental Europe to North America, and it was the first ocean liner to receive a permanent set of wireless equipment. Quite by chance, the wireless signal from that ship was received initially at the equally new wireless station at Holyhead in Wales rather than at Rosslare in Ireland, and that Morse Code communication is claimed as the first wireless signal received on land from a transatlantic ship at sea.
After a brief span of just two years at Holyhead, the Marconi wireless station was closed (on July 13, 1903), and it gave way to a new station with new equipment, not on a Welsh island, but rather near Liverpool itself, on the English mainland.
Exactly 95 years later, in July 1998, the famous daughter of the famous Italian radio inventor made a pilgrimage to Holyhead as part of a series of radio events honoring the significant Marconi backgrounds in the area. Princess Elettra Marconi stated that she was very pleased to visit the location of the Holyhead station that had played an interesting and important part in early wireless history.
Now, before we investigate the launching of the new wireless station near Liverpool, we visit instead two other islands with similar names on the outer (northwestern) edge of Holy Island. These two islands are identified on the map as South Stack Island and North Stack Island and they are just one and a quarter miles apart.
South Stack Island, with just seven acres, is nowadays a tourist destination, with a modern and safe walkway bridge connected to Holy Island. The island lighthouse was erected back in 1809, and nearly one hundred years later, the American radio entrepreneur Dr. Lee De Forest installed a temporary experimental wireless station at this location.
In November 1903, Lee De Forest conducted a series of wireless experiments between his two experimental stations, one at the South Stack Lighthouse and the other across the intervening waterway at Howth in Ireland. De Forest declared that the experiments were successful, and he also stated that there was no mutual interference with the Marconi station at five mile distant Holyhead. And we might add, that was not likely either, due to the fact that the Marconi station had been closed four months earlier.
North Stack Island is little more than an unvisited huge broken up rock jutting up out of the Irish Sea, about half an acre in size. There is no record of any wireless station on North Stack, though in earlier years there was a huge fog horn on the top of the rock which was operated under the high pressure of compressed air. In a subsequent tragic event, an American B24 bomber returning from a raid over continental Europe crashed into the ocean against the island cliffs on December 22, 1944, when it ran out of fuel during a night time rain storm while making a go-round landing attempt on nearby Holy Island. Six of the eight crew members died when they parachuted into the frigid ocean waters.
The new Marconi equipped wireless station near Liverpool was installed on Seaforth Sands, an outer suburban area north of Liverpool city itself in 1903. A new building to house the wireless equipment was erected, together with a tall three-section stayed mast.
Six years later (1909), the Marconi wireless station at Seaforth Sands was taken over by the GPO (General Post Office) in England; and two years later again (1911), the station was moved to Sandy Road, half a mile inland. During the following half a century, the station was modernized, rebuilt and upgraded a few times, and then transferred back to Wales, on Anglesey Island.
More about this important Marconi wireless station here in Wavescan, next week.