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| The white cliffs on the Isle of Wight |
From
the Needles to Colombo: The Radio Story on the Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is located on the
southern edge of England half a dozen miles across the waterway known as the
Solent. The island itself is
approximately 25 miles by 12 miles, and it might be described as a diamond
shaped diagonal square. Tourism is the
island’s
main industry, and dinosaur fossils are found in the chalk cliffs. The resident population is around 140,000.
The island is rich in European and British
history, and it was known as Vectis under the rule of the Roman Empire two
thousand years ago. At one stage it was
an independent kingdom during the era of the 1400s.
The most famous building on the Isle
of Wight is Osborne House, built under the direction of the illustrious Queen
Victoria in the mid 1800s. At the time
when Melbourne was the temporary capital city of Australia, before the federal
development of Canberra, Government House was designed and built as a copy of
Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
It was in November 1897 that the
famous Italian wireless inventor, Guglielmo Marconi, made a visit to the Isle
of Wight and he rented rooms in the Royal Needles Hotel overlooking Alum Bay on
the western tip for the winter. The
Needles were a neat row of four rocky pinnacles extending out into the edge of
the bay, though the slender most has long since collapsed.
Marconi installed his wireless
equipment in the Billiard Room, and a 168 foot tall wooden mast was erected in
the grounds nearby. Work on the
installation of the wireless station was completed by Marconi’s
assistant George Kemp on December 5 (1897), and next day, Monday December 6,
test transmissions were commenced.
On the Tuesday, test transmissions
began with two tug boats belonging to the South Western Railway Company. These two tugs, the “Solent” and
the “Mayflower”,
received the Morse Code tests from the new Marconi wireless station in the
Royal Needles Hotel while they were stationary in Alum Bay, and while
maneuvering around the Solent waterway.
On January 9 of the New Year 1898,
Marconi gave a successful public demonstration of his wireless equipment. Then, on July 3, the station was opened for
commercial Morse Code messages back to the English mainland.
In March 1899, the Marconi company shipped a load of wireless
equipment on a motor launch to the nearby French coast, where it was installed
on the ocean front at Wimereux. On the
27th, the world’s first international wireless messages were exchanged
between the two Marconi stations, Wimereux in France and the Needles on the
Isle of Wight in England. This first
message ended with three Vs in Morse Code
…_ signifying victory, success.
On
June 3, Lord Kelvin sent the world’s
first paid wireless telegram from the new Marconi station at Needles on the
Isle of Wight. This message, which was
addressed to Sir George Stokes and Sir William Preece, simply stated the route
by which it traveled, from the Isle of Wight by wireless to nearby Bournemouth
on the English mainland, and thence by wire to Cambridge & Glasgow. Lord Kelvin paid one shilling for this
historic exercise.
During a 16 day period in August of
this same
year 1898, 150 messages were successfully transmitted between the Royal Yacht “Osborne” and
Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Osborne House was the private home of the elderly Queen Victoria and her
9 children; and during this time period the Royal Yacht “Osborne” was
afloat in the Solent, the waterway that separates the Isle of Wight from the
English mainland.
During a visit to Paris, the eldest
son and heir apparent to the royal throne, Prince Albert Edward, fell and hurt
his knee. He chose to spend his time of
convalescence aboard the Royal Yacht “Osborne”,
and Queen Victoria invited Marconi to install wireless equipment at both
locations for communication between the royal mother and her son.
The landbased terminal was installed
in Ladywood Cottage in the spacious grounds of the grand Osborne palace. As a gesture of appreciation, the 79 year old
queen invited the 24 year old Marconi to lunch at Osborne House.
On November 15, 1899, Marconi was
aboard the ship SS “St. Paul”,
some 36 miles near to the Isle of Wight on his return voyage from a visit to
North America. A bulletin of news was
transmitted in Morse Code from the Royal Needles Hotel and received on the “St.
Paul” where
it was printed out for the passengers as the world’s
first wireless newspaper at sea, the Transatlantic Times.
However, the hotel owner increased
the rent during the next year 1900 by £1 per week and so Marconi dismantled
the station in June and re-erected it with additional new equipment on Knowles
Farm at Niton on the bottom tip of the island.
The final message from the Royal Needles at Alum Bay was on May 26.
Test transmissions from the new
Niton station began on January 22, 1901; and next day a new distance record was
established with reception at the Lizard in Cornwall, a distance of 196
miles. Eight years later, the Niton
station was taken over by the British Post Office.
A new Marconi station was
constructed nearby at Lower Niton. As
time went by, this station was granted the callsign GNI and it operated as
Niton Radio for marine communication. During
World War 2, Niton Radio was bombed by the German Air Force, with some superficial
damage nearby. Niton Radio was finally
closed on May 31, 1997.
During the war, several additional
temporary stations were installed on the Isle of Wight, including radar
stations and a mobile communication facility that was placed on the air near
Chichester immediately before D-Day, the
massive invasion of continental Europe which began on June 6, 1944.
Towards the end of the year 1944, an
aerial system, probably a multi-wire rhombic, and some of the temporary
electronic equipment on the Isle of Wight was disassembled and shipped to
Colombo Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was back then, for installation at the new
SEAC broadcasting station at Ekala,
However, the ship was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ceylon and the
radio equipment was lost. A second
shipment was soon afterwards sent out from England and this was installed at
the historic SEAC station at Ekala.
The first, and only, medium wave
broadcasting station, Isle of Wight Radio, was inaugurated on April 15, 1990
with a 500 watt transmitter at Briddlesford Farm on 1242 kHz. This station transferred to the FM band in
March 1998, and the medium wave unit was closed down soon afterwards.
(AWR-Wavescan/NWS 287)
