St. John's — Harbour, Fire & Signal Hill
Cabot Tower and Marconi
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Cabot Tower was built around the turn of the twentieth century to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the claimed four-hundredth anniversary of John Cabot's Atlantic voyage.
It later became part of a much more modern story.
On 12 December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi reported receiving the first transatlantic wireless signal here, the Morse-code letter S transmitted from Cornwall, England.
The experiment became a landmark in communications history, although historians have debated the exact technical circumstances of what Marconi heard.
Signal Hill had already been used for visual signalling to ships for generations. Wireless transformed the scale, not the basic purpose.
Flags once announced vessels approaching the harbour. Radio linked the hill directly across the Atlantic.
That is a remarkable continuity: the same high ground served cannon, flags, cable and wireless.
Finish by looking at the ocean. The horizon that once marked isolation became a communications route.