October 17, 1907

Clifden Wireless Station

Limited transatlantic wireless press service opens between Clifden and Glace Bay

A reported 10,000 words crossed on opening day — even though the stations could handle only one message at a time, and every word was Morse.

Morse across the Atlantic, one message at a time

On 17 October 1907, Marconi's stations at Clifden in Ireland and Marconi Towers near Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, officially opened a transatlantic wireless service. The two sites were more than 3,000 kilometres apart.

The traffic was a limited press service in wireless telegraphy — Morse-code press dispatches and congratulatory telegrams, not voice or broadcast programming. A reported 10,000 words crossed in both directions that day, although the stations could handle only one message at a time and transmission was slow.

Guglielmo Marconi supervised operations at Glace Bay; an archival photograph shows him waiting in the receiving room while James A. Holmes listened for Clifden through a weak spell in the signal.

Who sent what

Leonard R. Johnstone worked the Glace Bay transmitter for the official messages to Clifden, and W. S. Entwistle directed the Irish station's opening-day transmissions.

The dispatches included one from Lord Avebury to The New York Times, and a telegram from Canada's governor-general, Earl Grey, congratulating King Edward VII on the new link. The King answered Earl Grey by the same route on 18 October.

The Glace Bay receiving room used seven Fleming valves and a makeshift tuning coil assembled from the linings of two ten-inch induction coils.

Not the first signal, and not yet ordinary telegrams

This was not the first time a radio signal crossed the Atlantic. Marconi's one-way Newfoundland experiment took place in 1901, and messages crossed from the Canadian side in 1902.

Nor was the service unrestricted. A 1908 Marconi-company history describes 17 October as the start of a limited press-message service and dates ordinary messages to 3 February 1908; Parks Canada describes 17 October as the official opening for public use.

The stations were linked to London, Montreal and New York by land telegraph lines, so an end-to-end newspaper message did not travel entirely by radio.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

Contemporary and later sources use “commercial,” “regular,” and “public” somewhat differently. A 1908 Marconi-company history describes October 17 as the start of a limited press-message service and dates ordinary messages to February 3, 1908; Parks Canada describes October 17 as the official opening for public use.
“Glace Bay station” can cause location confusion. The 1907 installation was the expanded Marconi Towers site toward Port Morien, south of Glace Bay, rather than Marconi’s original Table Head installation.
The opening did not establish the first transatlantic radio signal or first two-way experiment; those milestones preceded the commercial press service.