CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Marconi’s Signal Across the Atlantic

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At the end of the nineteenth century, a young Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi was working on a way to send telegraph messages without wires, using radio waves. By 1899, his equipment had carried signals across the English Channel, but his ambition was far greater: he wanted to send a message from Europe to North America. Many respected scientists believed this was impossible. Radio waves, they argued, travelled in straight lines, so they would continue out into space instead of following the curve of the Earth. Marconi went ahead anyway and built a powerful transmitting station at Poldhu, on the coast of Cornwall in England. In September 1901, however, a storm wrecked the station’s huge ring of masts, and he had to replace it with a smaller, simpler antenna.

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In December 1901, Marconi arrived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, with two assistants and set up his receiving equipment in a building on Signal Hill, overlooking the harbour. Because there was no time to build tall masts, he planned to lift a long wire antenna into the sky. The weather was against him. On the first attempt, strong winds tore a balloon carrying the wire loose, and it disappeared over the sea. The team turned to kites instead. On December 12, holding a telephone earpiece to his ear, Marconi heard three faint clicks: the letter “S” in Morse code. Operators in Poldhu, more than 3,000 kilometres away, had been tapping out that letter again and again at times agreed on beforehand.

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Not everyone believed him. The signal had been extremely weak, it had not been recorded on paper, and the only people who heard it were Marconi and one of his assistants. Some experts suggested that he had mistaken ordinary electrical noise for the clicks he hoped to hear. Marconi also faced a more practical problem. A cable company that held exclusive rights to telegraph communication in Newfoundland threatened to take him to court, and he was forced to stop his experiments there. The Canadian government quickly offered him financial support to continue in Nova Scotia, and he built a new station at Glace Bay, on Cape Breton Island. In December 1902, complete messages were sent from there across the Atlantic.

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Within a few years, Marconi’s wireless system was being used on ships around the world, and a regular transatlantic message service began in 1907. In 1909, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on wireless telegraphy. Scientists later explained what his critics had missed: a layer of the upper atmosphere reflects certain radio waves back toward the ground, allowing them to travel much farther than anyone had expected. Today, Signal Hill is a national historic site, and visitors to Cabot Tower at its summit can learn about the experiment that, for many people, marked the beginning of global communication.