Radio Machrihanish

Radio Machrihanish Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (1866-1932) had been on holiday in Ontario when Guglielmo Marconi had made his first radio transmission in 1895 and, idly tossing a stone into a water-pool, Fessenden, watching the ripples spreading out across the pool, suddenly realised how radio signals must too spread out to be picked up by radio antennas. Canadian-born Fessenden had been Thomas Edison’s chief chemist but, when Edison went bankrupt, he had found employment with The Westinghouse Corporation. Foreseeing the possibility of superimposing the human voice on a smooth continuous flow of oscillations in much the same way as Alexander Graham Bell had used ordinary electric currents to carry telephone circuits, Fessenden set out on his own to build the necessary equipment and, on Sunday, December 23, 1900, in a cabin on Cobb Island, near Washington, he shouted in to a microphone “1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - Is it snowing where you are Mr Thiessen ? ” and, from over a mile away, Mr Thiessen wired back the telegraph message “I hear you perfectly, sir. Your v o i c e is loud and clear” ! Almost a full year later, at 12.30 p.m. on Thursday, December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi, based at a transmitter on Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland, successfully signalled the Morse letter “S” 2.170 miles across The Atlantic to his 10kW listening station at Poldhu in Cornwall where it was heard by George Stephen Kemp and Percy Paget. Fessenden too had been improving his own equipment and had begun the search for suitable transmitter sites on both sides of The Atlantic. In 1904, The General Electric Company of Schenectady’s Ernst F. W. Alexanderson was assigned the task of designing a new alternator for Fessenden’s experiments. His proposal, to employ a stationary iron armature between two rotating discs, was rejected by Fessenden who insisted that the armature had to be made of wood - G.E.C. rightly safe-guarded Alexanderson’s original device with a patent and it indeed turned out to be an epoch-making breakthrough that won Alexanderson international acclaim. Now Fessenden engaged The Brown Hoisting Machinery Company of Cleveland, Ohio to erect two 420-foot aerial towers, one at Blackman’s Point (Brant Rock), Massachusetts and the other at Machrihanish, on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland - In theory, there is a notional 120-mile high ‘wall of water (and Earth)’ between points on opposite sides of The Atlantic. Fessenden’s new company. The National Electric Signalling Company, leased six acres of ground (past the old lifeboat station, it not built till 1912) from Captain MacNeal of Ugadale and Losset in May 1905. The lease was for a period of six years with a further two year option on termination. The job of driving in a road and preparing the ground being given to Campbeltown contractor Neil McArthur and construction of the actual mast and station beginning after the Glasgow Fair Holiday, on Tuesday, August 1, 1905. The preliminary plans were for a three-foot diameter, 400-foot high mast with two 50-foot long cross-spars at the top. In the end, the plans were changed to give a five-foot diameter, 450-foot high mast with three 50-foot cross-spars at the top and a continuous internal ladder running to the top, the whole structure being mounted on a large concrete block via a ball-and-joint arrangement. To support the mast, guys were run from four mast platforms spaced at 100foot intervals, both tower and guys being carefully insulated from the earth. To provide a ground-plane for the aerial system, the whole site was fenced off, another little job for Neil McArthur and the whole area covered with a grid of wires laid in shallow, earth-filled, trenches. The whole system was then ‘earthed’ by connecting all the wire-ends and burying them in a deep trench running along the shoreline at sea-level. Though it cannot now be said with certainty, for there were a number of steam traction engines and trailers about the area, it is more than likely that most of the 70 tons of steel components and the miles of wires for the tower would be transported to Machrihanish by the coal mine’s railway for the roads of the time, occupied too in summer by the horsedrawn charabancs carrying day trippers from the steamers, were ill-suited to heavy traffic. The aerial mast-tower was constructed of more than fifty, 8-feet long, five foot diameter, tubular pipe sections. At the time the mast-tower was being built, the railway had eighteen flat ‘platform’ trucks, each about 12-feet long and over four feet wide - coal trains usually hauling six trucks at any one time. It would not have been too difficult to rope two tower pipe sections ‘athwartships’ on each truck, the pipe sections overhanging by a couple of feet on each side - the trucks normally carrying four coal ‘hutches’, each with about 1,000 lbs of coal, would have had no weight problems either. If the materials did indeed go by rail, everything would have needed to be hauled from the New Quay, where there was a crane, to the railway coal yard, off the junction at Argyll Street and then transferred from rail to road at the colliery and taken out to the Machrihanish mast site, a mile or so away. 1

In any case, the mast was erected, as was the Forth Railway Bridge, using a ‘self-climbing’ construction system. For its first forty feet, five of the eight foot sections were hoisted into place by means of a separate erection pole, each joint bolted into place by a fitter and thereafter the mast itself became the erection pole. At each lift, a temporary cross-arm was installed, a pulley wheel at its end to raise a further section into place, the cross-arm and pulley being moved everupwards until the mast was completed, the fitter’s bosun’s chair swinging ever-higher as the joints and wire guy ropes securely fixed into place. The work completed on both sides of The Atlantic, Brant Rock made its first exchange of signals with Machrihanish on Wednesday, January 3, 1906, Fessenden, despite his disdain of Morse code, choosing to send the letter “D” again and again across the ocean. Fessenden was ecstatic, he was the first to r e p e a t e d l y exchange wireless signals across The Atlantic. Messages were sent almost constantly between the stations over the next three days, the, quite unaccountably, communication ceased and the silence continued for some three weeks. Baffled almost to the point of despair, Fessenden was just about to give up trying when, quite suddenly, messages again began to pass between the two stations again. There were to be other unexplained breaks in communication during the year but Fessenden worked on and then, albeit by accident rather than intention, his dream of sending human speech across The Atlantic came true. In November 1906, he received a letter from Mr Armor, the American operator at the Machrihanish mast “ At four o’clock this (undated) morning, I was listening for telegraph signals from Brant Rock when, to my astonishment, I heard, instead of dots and dashes, the voice of Mr Stein (the Brant Rock radio mast operator) telling Plymouth (11 miles along the coast from Brant Rock) how to run their dynamo.” It was by then quite normal for the Brant Rock and Plymouth operators to use speech over the short distance between the two stations but almost unbelievable that their conversation should have been heard at Machrihanish. Log-books and operators accounts were checked and re-checked and all concluded that just 0.2 seconds after Mr Stein had spoken to the Plymouth operator, his voice, having travelled the long way round Earth, had been heard by Mr Armor, the American operator, at Machrihanish. History had been made but, as Fessenden well knew, one should never announce ones success until you are certain of reproducing results. Preparations were duly put in hand to give a public demonstration of speech crossing The Atlantic on December 11, 1906 but, with just five days to go, an Atlantic storm began to blow up. Disaster struck Machrihanish at one o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 5, 1906. By mid-day, the mast was visibly swaying backwards and forwards and then, without warning, one of the stays on the west side of the mast gave way. There was a loud ‘double report’ and the mast collapsed, the lowest 100-foot section falling first and forwards to the north and then the remaining 320-foot upper section crashing backwards to the south. Luckily there were no casualties. Bravely, the site manager, Mr H. J. Glaubitz, announced that the mast would be rebuilt but, within weeks, the staff had left and the station site demolished soon afterwards. Six days after the Machrihanish mast’s collapse, Brant Rock, as scheduled, carried a series of speech tests and Fessenden, to bolster his disappointment, decided to make T h e W o r l d’ s f i r s t e v e r a d v e r t- i s e d b r o a d c a s t o f s p e e c h a n d m u s i c on Christmas Eve, 1906. At 9 p.m. that night, he sent out a general “CQ” signal in Morse code, stepped up to the microphone and gave a short speech about the programme to follow. The Edison phonograph squeaked out a solo voice singing Handel’s ‘Largo’ and then Fessenden picked up his violin and played his own version of Gounod’s ‘O Holy Night’, even managing to sing the last verse as he played ! As his helpers voices froze from microphone shyness, Fessenden read a passage from The Bible and closed the festive programme by wishing his listeners ‘A Merry Christmas’ and then announced that he would give another programme on New Year’s Eve. The Christmas Eve broadcast was picked up by a number of U.S. Navy radio operators, by some operators on United Fruit Company banana boats and by a few amateurs living in the five-mile area round about Brant Rock. Atmospheric conditions were even more favourable on New Year’s Eve and reliable reception was reported from as far away as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Fessenden’s company, FESCO - The National Electric Signalling Company, was badly mis-managed and by 1910 it had collapsed in dispute and acrimony and at one stage armed detectives forcibly evicted all of Fessenden’s team from the Brant Rock site BUT . . . Fessenden’s team, armed with shotguns, retook the transmitter ! The 420-foot high mast at Brant Rock was dismantled in 1917. Fessenden gave away many of his inventions and saw the greatest of all, radio, pass from company to company without reward for himself. Canadian by birth, he formed a radio company in Montreal but was snubbed by the Canadian government who gave the rights for radio broadcasting to the Marconi company. Fessenden’s lawyers fought 2

patent infringements through the courts for some twenty years and eventually, on March 31, 1928, won a $2.5 m award from one of the big radio companies which allowed Fessenden to retire to Bermuda where he died in 1932. Even though, like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and many others, he had never finished college, Fessenden applied for a post at McGill University - attended too by the late 12th Duke of Argyll - but lost the post to an American ! Fessenden did in fact become Professor of Electrical Engineering at Purdue and Pittsburgh Universities. He also worked for the U.S. Weather Bureau and set up their telegraphic weather station links. Despite his failure to secure any financial rewards from his broadcasting patents, he did make sizeable financial rewards from his other, particularly marine, inventions and patents and in particular from his ‘fathometer’, the original echo-sounder, forerunner of today’s electronic fish-finders. Fessenden eventually held some 500 patents including those for the turbo-electric drive for warships, electrical insulating tape, an amplified piano, tracer bullets, electric gyroscopes and a host of underwater sound devices which included a World War I ‘U-Boat’ (asdic) detector and he was awarded The Scientific American Medal for his 100 or so inventions which made the seas and oceans safer for seamen and fishermen. Fessenden too built the first power generating station at Niagra Falls ! Just before he died, he wrote of himself “My parents despaired of me and saw my future as a church minister or a teacher but, when I closed my eyes and dreamed, I saw an invention that could send voices round The World without using wires or cables. “There’s no future in that,” my mother told me and she was both right and wrong ! Despite all my hard work, I lived most of my life in near poverty and I fought years of court battles before seeing even a penny from my greatest inventions. Worst of all, I was ridiculed by journalists, businessmen and even other scientists for believing that voice could be transmitted without using wires. But, by the time of my death, not only was I wealthy from my patents but (know) all of those people who laughed at my ideas were twisting their dials on their newly bought radios to hear the latest news and weather ! “ An admirer of Fessenden’s work said “When he took hold of an idea, his mind glimpsed it as though looking through a thousand windows.” Today, his only memorials are the concrete bases of his radio masts at Brant Rock and Machrihanish. Neither has any plaque to record their purpose or significance.

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