The Lizard and Poldhu Station

When James Clerk Maxwell passed away in 1879, he couldn’t have imagined that within two decades the electromagnetic waves predicted by his equations would be used to communicate wirelessly across distances of dozens of miles. It was a young Italian engineer named Guglielmo Marconi who had the audacity to think that he could use Maxwell’s waves to send information over distances of not just dozens, or even hundreds, of miles, but across the two thousand miles separating the Old World from the New.

As it was at the start, our journey is now shaped by geography – we’re traveling from far eastern England, where Watson Watt placed his Chain Home radars as close to Germany as he could, to Cornwall in the far west of England, where Marconi sought to minimize the distance his radio waves would have to travel to be detected in America. We’ll live where Marconi lived while he tested his theories; students will learn the science and history of radio communication at Marconi’s station on The Lizard. From there, we’ll make the short trip to Poldhu Station, where in 1901 the crackling and sparking of a mighty transmitter announced the beginning of a new paradigm in the world of communication.