October 21: First Transatlantic Voice Message (1915)
Prayer Idea
Pray for people who are developing new communication technologies.
History Note
Telegraphy was the fastest form of communication for decades in the 19th century. Telegraphy required wires to be installed, either over land or under water. People established reliable communication by telegraph across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1860s.
Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) was an Italian inventor who developed a way to transmit telegraph signals without wires in 1896. This technique was originally called radiotelegraphy. This was later shortened to radio. Marconi was able to transmit telegraph signals across the Atlantic in the early 1900s.
Alexander Graham Bell created a telephone in 1876. Bell and his collaborator Charles Tainter created the photophone in 1880, which allowed wireless communication using light. Marconi’s radio quickly surpassed the maximum range of the photophone, though research on the photophone continued for several decades.
On October 21, 1915, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) transmitted voice using radio waves from Arlington, Virginia, to Paris, France. A man in Virginia spoke into transmission equipment. The radio signal traveled through the air, and engineers at the Eiffel Tower received it. When their equipment converted it back into speech, they could understand the words. Because radio signals can spread out in all directions, AT&T workers in Hawaii also received the radio transmission.
Though ships used voice communication by radio to a limited extent during World War I, the technology for commercial, two-way radio communication across the Atlantic was not available until 1927.
This image of Marconi’s Transatlantic Radiotelegraphic Station in Ireland is from the 1916 book An Elementary Manual of Radiotelegraphy and Radiotelephony for Students and Operators by J. A. Fleming. Fleming (1849-1945) was a British electrical engineer and physicist who designed the transmitter Marconi used for his first transatlantic radio transmission in 1901.
Learn More
Watch a short video about how people use radio waves to carry information.
Find more resources at Homeschool History.
