Guglielmo Marconi’s sole visit to Crookhaven in the summer of 1901, and the village’s connection to his pioneering work in developing radio wave communications, are locally celebrated. Crookhaven was an ideal location for Marconi to test his equipment’s range. It was over the horizon from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, 225 miles over water where his antenna was located and Julius Reuter’s telegraph office was still there enabling communication with his staff.

The engineers, physicists and scientists involved in, or watching the progress of, the radio pioneers’ experiments didn’t understand how radio worked, just that it did. There was no scientific understanding of the technology to enable prediction of performance. Consequently, development of radio technology was a trial-and-error process with improvements to the hardware incrementally increasing the distance a signal could be sent and intelligibly received.

By the time Marconi arrived in Crookhaven, his immediate ambition was to sufficiently extend the range of his equipment to send a radio signal across the Atlantic ocean. Wired telegraphy had conquered land but not water, which was still a vast communications challenge even though, by the time Marconi was promoting radio, many of the world’s oceans had been traversed by telegraph cables. If Marconi was to compete with wired telegraphy he would need to be able to communicate across the world’s oceans. He now needed to establish two things: that radio waves could be reliably received over the horizon; and the amount of electrical power that would be required to send a signal across the Atlantic.

If you would like to know more about Marconi’s work on the Mizen: www.buythebook.ie/this-is-the-mizen/