21 July 1901: Queen Victoria was dead; a Bandon woman was doing 14 days’ hard labour for being drunk and disorderly; and this newspaper cost one penny.

On Skibbereen railway station, crowds lined the platform, eager to glimpse an important gentleman.

According to the Southern Star, the fairer sex was especially keen, since that person was a bachelor. Only he didn’t show up.

When Signor Guglielmo Marconi arrived by a later train, he quickly crossed to the tramway station and boarded a carriage for Schull.

Final destination Crookhaven to carry out special tests.

Twenty-seven-year-old Marconi was bilingual in Italian and English.

His Irish mother, Annie Jameson (one of the Jameson whisky family from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford), had encouraged him to pursue science: ‘I owe what success I have had more than anything to the encouragement and inspiration of my mother,’ he said.

Focused and disciplined, Marconi grew up with ‘the overwhelming feeling that I would one day do something new and great’.

By age ten or eleven, writes his biographer Marc Raboy (Marconi – The Man Who Networked The World, 2016), ‘he had started doing experiments that were consuming nearly all of his time.

By 1893 he had become fascinated with the idea that electromagnetic waves, rather than wires, could be used to communicate through space.

Experimenting in the attic at home – a splendid 17th century villa near Bologna – Marconi managed wireless transmissions over two kilometres to a neighbouring hillside.

‘He was a gifted DIY man’, assembling parts made by others, says UCC Prof Michael Sexton.

However, his father, Giuseppe, supposedly felt his experiments were a waste of time, as did the Italian Minister of Post and Telegraph.

So, in 1896, he and his mother left for England, where they had many friends and relatives, and could launch Guglielmo’s invention ‘on a large scale’. That June he filed a patent for a system of telegraphy using waves. The following year he got Irish grain merchants to invest in his Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, and established a base in Poldhu, Cornwall. 

A cousin arranged a meeting with Sir William Preece, Chief Engineer of the General Post Office, who asked him to demonstrate his equipment on Salisbury Plain.

Over the next few years, he successfully transmitted across the Bristol Channel, Solent, English Channel and finally the Atlantic to Newfoundland – despite the claims of science that this was impossible.

Ireland

Marconi arrived in Ireland in 1901 and set up eight ship-to-shore stations, beginning in the north at Ballycastle.

‘My work keeps increasing as the practical applications of my invention grow,’ he wrote to his father.

And so to West Cork. Crookhaven was the first or last point of call for ships crossing the Atlantic.

For many years, staff from Reuters news agency had gone out to meet incoming ships, retrieve news in canisters, and telegraph it to Cork, Dublin and London.

Up on Brow Head, Reuters and Lloyd’s would signal to passing ships with flags by day, and lights by night.

Sailors from Crookhaven and Cape Clear rowed huge distances in small boats to listen for horn blasts from ships in distress. A perilous task – especially in Mizen fog.

The Crookhaven base turned out less than ideal. One of Marconi’s staff commented: ‘The first impression on arriving at the village… is that ‘the end of everywhere’ has been reached’.  Marconi wrote to his friend, Miss Holman: ‘The people are very wild… very poor. I hope to take you here someday (I don’t expect however you would stay long!). It is nearly as bad, although not quite so bad, as Cape Cod.’

In the grounds of ‘Marconi House’ (today, luxury rental apartments), he erected a 180-foot mast.

A ‘record’ number of spectators boarded a special train in Cork on 16 June 1901 to witness what the Southern Star called an ‘epoch-making experiment’, when Marconi made contact with the liner Lucania mid-Atlantic on her way from New York.

A transmitting station was established in Crookhaven village in 1902, with six operators working in pairs, eight hours at a time.

At first, some people worried that the ‘tremendous voltages’ emitted produced abnormally heavy and continuous rainfall: ‘wireless weather’.  But most acknowledged that Marconi had ‘held the world spellbound’ by the ‘brilliancy of his wireless telegraphy’ (Southern Star 4 April 1903).

In 1904, under the supervision of telegrapher Arthur Nottage (‘Daddy’) – later landlord of the Welcome Inn – Crookhaven station was moved to Brow Head.

That year was crucial in Marconi’s life: he met his future wife, Beatrice O’Neil from Inchiquin Castle, Co Clare, and signed a contract with the Commissioners of Irish Lights to put telegraphic equipment on Fastnet Lighthouse.

Messages picked up by traditional signalling methods at Fastnet could now be transmitted to Brow Head by wireless telegraphy for relaying to the U.K. and Europe.

Marconi’s vision saved countless lives at sea, since ships could now stay in contact even when invisible to the naked eye. If it hadn’t been for wireless, probably everyone aboard the Titanic would have perished in April 1912.

Sadly, his prophesy the same year that wireless would prevent wars, since human beings could now better communicate with each other, was wishful thinking in the extreme.

The 1920s witnessed the global spread of wireless using short waves. As more shipping companies installed Marconi equipment, it was no longer necessary for transmitting stations to be physically close to ships.

The role of Crookhaven as a communications hub was over and it reverted to a quiet fishing port.

Today, at the foot of Brow Head sits a figure with a cupped hand to his left ear, his right arm outstretched towards a steel spiral – an electromagnetic wave.

The sculpture, crafted by the late Susan O’Toole, pays tribute to one of the world’s most important inventors, a ‘plain, unaffected man’, according to the Southern Star. 

A century before the Internet, before Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates… and Elon Musk, Guglielmo Marconi had ‘envisioned a world without communication borders’, concludes Raboy.

West Cork proved crucial in the realization of his dream.