BOSTON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- It is interesting to speculate what Guglielmo Marconi would think about the state of radio communications today.
Doubtless the "Father of Radio" would be amazed at cellular telephones and space communications, but perhaps feel some satisfaction for having helped spark a technological revolution.
Marconi's historic role in developing wireless communications is being marked on Cape Cod, Mass.
"This is actually the 100th anniversary of the first wireless transmission between the United States and Europe, an event that took place on Jan. 18, 1903," said Scottee Nista, a park ranger at the Cape Cod National Seashore.
All week Marconi's accomplishments have been celebrated with several special events through Sunday at the park's Salt Pond Visitor Center and at the Marconi Wireless Site several miles away on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in South Wellfleet.
But Saturday is the big day marking the first trans-Atlantic exchange of telegrams, Nista told United Press International.
There is a commemorative postal cancellation, a NASA Family Space Education Program, and various Marconi exhibits and artifacts. The event is billed as "Radio's 100th Birthday."
"At 12 o'clock we hope to make contact with" the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, she said, something Marconi likely would have appreciated.
Amateur operators from the Marconi Radio Club and Marconi Cape Cod Memorial Club plan to replicate Marconi's feat several times on Saturday.
The first message in the historic 1903 telegram, in Morse code, was from President Theodore Roosevelt to Britain's King Edward VII. Roosevelt was sending his "good wishes" to the king and his people, and celebrating the "wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy."
A short wait later, the king, from a transmission station in England replied, thanking Roosevelt for his "kind message."
Marconi, who lived from 1874 to 1937, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1909.
There's little left of Marconi's original transmission facility on Cape Cod.
When the Roosevelt-King telegram was sent, the site had a transmission house and four wooden towers rising 210 feet above the sand, supporting a giant antenna of several hundred copper wires.
Much of the original site has been eroded by the sea. Visitors can see what's left of the transmitter house and on the encroaching beach, at low tide, the base of one tower.
Nearby in a park service gazebo exhibits tell the story of the station.
Marconi, who was born in Bologna, Italy, began experimenting with radio waves in the early 1890s, and over the following years laid the foundation for what today is known as radio.
He successfully made wireless transmissions over short distances across the English Channel and to ships at sea, but the prevailing theory at the time was that radio waves could not be sent much more than 200 miles because of the curvature of the Earth.
Marconi, building sites on both sides of the Atlantic, set out to prove otherwise.
In 1901, he used his system to transmit the first wireless signal -- three Morse code dots for the letter "S" -- across the Atlantic from his British station at Poldhu, Cornwall, to an antenna hoisted as high as possible on balloons at St. John's Newfoundland.
The experiment proved that radio waves would not be lost because of the curve of the earth.
He later wrote, prophetically: "I now felt for the first time absolutely certain that the day would come when mankind would be able to send messages without wires not only across the Atlantic but between the farthermost ends of the earth."
Building on that success, Marconi established a larger facility with the four towers at South Wellfleet, making history in 1903 with the first trans-Atlantic radio exchange.
As countless millions of people around the world walk around with their cell phones today, Nista agreed, little thought is given to that moment in history 100 years ago.
"Cell phones? Any wireless communication?" the park ranger pondered. "I think we sort of take it for granted nowadays."
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(More information can be found at the Web sites marconiusa.org, nobel.se/physics, nps.gov/caco.)
