Technology History | Signal Hill, St John's — Not in the Tower, in the Fever Hospital

The pin is Cabot Tower because the room where the signal was heard is not there any more.

On 12 December 1901 Marconi was in an abandoned fever and diphtheria hospital about ninety metres from the tower, with a kite holding his aerial up in a gale that had already defeated two balloons.

The photograph shows him beside the apparatus that day: a plain table, a stove pipe, bare shelving, an improvised room in a building nobody wanted.

Wikimedia files that photograph as the inside of Cabot Tower. The tower is stone and was four years old; the record puts Marconi in the hospital, and the picture agrees with the record.

What he heard was three faint clicks in a telephone earpiece, the letter S sent from Cornwall, arriving at 12.30, at 1.10 and at 2.20.

The only other listener was George Kemp, his assistant, and no machine wrote anything down, which is why the claim was disputed from the week it was made.

The hospital burned on 18 December 1920.

Cabot Tower itself was finished in 1900 for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the four hundredth anniversary of John Cabot's landfall, and it later held a working Marconi station, which is part of why the two buildings blur together in the retelling.

The tower now holds exhibits about the reception, a gift shop and the amateur station VO1AA, which visiting operators run in summer.

The markers stand in and around the car park, one for the transatlantic signal and one for the fever hospital, which is the closest anyone can now get to the actual room.

Photo: James Vey, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons