Thursday, Jim and I went to Chatham, Cape Cod to visit the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center. The building Jim is standing in front of in the first pic above was built in 1914 by Guglielmo Marconi. It is still in excellent condition as well as the house were all the Morse Code technicians lived while working at this station. I'm not a technical person, but I did find this place quite interesting. Jim of course loved it. After visiting Wellfleet yesterday and seeing the sight of Marconi's first experimental station this was a nice follow up visit. At Wellfleet, Marconi proved for the first time that long distance from America to Europe communications were technically viable. Now at Chatham commercial Maritime radio became a reality on a very large scale. RCA (Radio Corporation of America) acquired the station in 1920. These early stations including one in Nova Scotia communicated with ships and averted many disasters. The stations are credited with sending the Ship Carpathia to save the Titanic survivors. It is interesting to note that David Sarnoff, a young Marconi telegrapher and the man who would later start RCA, took credit for receiving the Titanic SOS, but was found out later to be off duty at that time! Apparently, among his many other talents, Mr Sarnoff was excellent at self promotion! The station was used to great advantage during the war years to warn of German U-boat activity. Jim remembered some of the Morse Code characters and actually saw some test equipment and an early radio that he had personal experience with--I knew he was getting a little wrinkled, but didn't realize he was THAT old! Arrrgh! From there we went to Main Street in Chatham and had lunch at the Captain's Table. Again, I enjoyed some clam chowder and a salad and Jim stuck to his usual BLT. There were lots of little shops along Main Street and we both enjoyed browsing. Jim also found a geocache in town. From there we drove to Hyannis. We found a really nice beach and from there we could see the Kennedy compound. We were about a block away but as you can see, the main house is so big we did get a glimpse of it. On our way home we decided to explore the Cape Cod Potato Chip Factory. It was pretty cool and we did buy enough potato chips to get us through our trip this summer.
1 comment:
Tell Jim you guys need to visit Signal Hill, St. John's, Newfoundland where the first Marconi transatlantic message was received on Dec. 12, 1901. This station also was one of the first to receive the distress signals coming from the RMS Titanic. I found it real interesting when we in NF back in 2006.
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