Marconi At Signal Hill: A Canadian History Minute

Okay, so the batting average for these Heritage Minute clips is about .750; meaning, I guess, three quarters of them are pretty good, which is not bad. The last one I posted - about the Halifax Explosion - contained some minor inaccuracies, but this one's more or less accurate.

Anyway, what can you get wrong about a guy (Guglielmo Marconi) going up a hill (Signal Hill), flying a kite, and getting a signal from Cornwall on the telegraph from it*? Although I must admit, the guy they got to play Marconi kinda gives me the creeps.

*Which he did on this day in 1901...
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Pop History Moment: Marconi At Signal Hill

3,500 kilometres of ocean separate Poldhu, in Cornwall, from St John's, Newfoundland; prior to this day in 1901 the only way to traverse it was by boat, subject to all the vagaries inherent in such a journey.

Guglielmo Marconi, however, had another idea; to bridge what seemed to many in those days as an insurmountable distance with a deceptively simple looking invention known as a telegraph.

Atop Signal Hill he raised a kite 122 metres in the air and waited... For a message that finally came. Dot-dot-dot... The Morse Code for the letter 's'; 's' as in 'success'.

In later years Marconi's reputation justifiably suffered after he made his sympathies for Italian Fascism - and support for Benito Mussolini's imperialist designs on the Ethiopian Empire - known. None of that, though, ought to lessen the accomplishment he made on that windy hilltop overlooking the North Atlantic on this day in 1901...
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