Introduction

Abstract

On December 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi, a young man of mixed Italian and British parentage, was on the windswept Signal Hill at St Johns’, Newfoundland.¹ He was sitting in a room in a disused military hospital at the top of the hill behind a table full of equipment. Outside, a wire ran up to a Baden-Powell six-sided linen kite which he and his assistant George Kemp were only keeping aloft with difficulty. They had already lost another kite and a balloon, and they were only using these because an antennae array at Cape Cod had blown down.