RadCom April 2024, Vol. 100, No. 4

Feature 72 April 2024 sons, Morse code in the hope of getting their help until Lloyds sent someone to take charge of the station. Four days later, Kemp was in Belfast where he tried, unsuccessfully as it proved, to obtain masts for the Rathlin and Ballycastle stations. On 22 and 23 June, 50 ‘Obach’ cells (a zinc/carbon dry cell) for transmission were fitted at the coal store station at Ballycastle Quay, and another 50 were fitted at the Lighthouse Station on Rathlin. On 2 July, wire and insulators arrived in Ballycastle from London ‘by the last train’ (as Kemp describes it), and by 5 July half the wire, insulators and stores were taken to Rathlin Island and fitted up at the station there for transmission. Kemp instructed signalman Dunovan of Lloyds, and his two sons in the working of the station. The next day news came from London to the effect that Kemp was to take all the apparatus, “half a ton of gear” as he noted in his diary, from Ballycastle to Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire), near Dublin, for the Kingstown Annual Regatta, where it was used to transmit reports of Kingstown Regatta to a Dublin newspaper, the Daily Express , from a steamer in Dublin Bay, the Flying Huntress. Marconi himself was present at these experiments, the first ever of messages being sent from sea to land by a vessel in motion. Upon the conclusion of the regatta, Kemp and Edward Glanville set out by train from Dublin back to Ballycastle. Glanville was put in charge of the Rathlin Island station with instructions to transmit to Kemp at the Ballycastle station at the end of every day. Kemp’s diary reads: “I received at various places and on the cliffs along the coast in the vicinity of Ballycastle, and received the best results on an aerial connected to the Roman Catholic Church spire in the town, but as there was no house or room available there—and the Company would not let me use a hut—there was not much chance to make a speedy job, as there was delay in getting spares from Belfast”. A sad tragedy occurred on Sunday, 21 August when Glanville, whilst out for a walk on Rathlin, accidentally fell over a cliff and was killed. The people on the island had often seen Glanville, who was interested in geology, climbing over the cliffs, and this was no doubt the cause of the accident. On 25 August, Kemp states that he finished the station and adjusted the receiver and the ‘inker’. He instructed Mr. Byrne in all the details of the transmitter, and requested him “to follow when he received the dots and dashes on the inker”. He sent messages to, and received messages from, Mr. Byrne until 1pm on that day, left the station on Rathlin in the charge of Mr. Dunovan and sons, and returned to Ballycastle. The experiments were now apparently proving very satisfactory: “messages were sent and received from 10am to 6.30pm”. Ten ships were reported, and Lloyds’ agent Mr. Byrne sent a report to Lloyds concerning the day’s work which had been carried out in a dense fog. The following day, 27 August, two more ships were reported to Lloyds. Poor weather kept them in Ballycastle, but on Thursday 1 September, the weather cleared, and Marconi and Kemp set out from Ballycastle at 9am and crossed to Rathlin in one hour with, as Kemp describes it, “a fair wind and large sail”. They visited the lighthouse, beside which the aerial mast was erected. Kemp got Dunovan and his sons to pack up the apparatus, while he took Marconi to see the cliff where Glanville lost his life. Thus, by early September 1898, the experiments came to an abrupt end at Ballycastle. Whether or not the accidental death of Glanville on Rathlin had anything to do with this it is impossible to say. Marconi and Kemp returned to Ballycastle at 2pm, as Kemp recorded: “pulling and sailing in one and a half hours”. The next day, Marconi left for London and Kemp took down the mast and the equipment and, on 8 September, Kemp too left for London. Whilst Kemp and Marconi enjoyed very close relations with the GPO, relations between Kemp and Lloyds were not as friendly. The Marconi system of wireless telegraphy between Ballycastle and Rathlin was not brought into use until 1905, when it finally replaced the ‘old system’. Despite the criticisms of Kemp in his relationship with Lloyds, the Ballycastle/Rathlin experiments must, nevertheless, have had some significance in the development of wireless telegraphy. Within two years, in 1900, Marconi had taken out his famous patent No. 7777 for ‘tuned or syntonic telegraphy’. Footnotes These experiments proved to be the pre-cursor for numerous subsequent maritime installations and the award of numerous contracts with the Royal Navy. It was in December 1901 that Marconi made the first transatlantic wireless communication from Cornwall to Newfoundland. What is often described as the most famous Marconi maritime wireless transmission was also linked to Northern Ireland – the distress call sent from the Belfast-built RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. As a footnote, my family also has a communications-related link to Rathlin Island. Many of you have most likely watched the recent television serial about John Stonehouse, the real-life Reginald Perrin. It was Stonehouse who initiated this connection. In 1969, Stonehouse, then Postmaster General, made a promise to the people of Rathlin that the island would get an automatic telephone exchange. The new exchange finally opened on Rathlin, in August 1976. The GPO were in the throes of upgrading the multitude of rural mainland exchanges at this point, so it was decided to establish a temporary installation until both the budget and capacity allowed the full installation to be made. My father and two other GPO engineers were dispatched to Rathlin in April 1972 with the task of installing a 23-subscriber- line modified MAX12 (mobile automatic exchange), linked to the mainland via a VHF radio link. Powered by heavy-duty car batteries, which were charged by a privately-owned generator, it was all housed in an old GPU trailer wagon (see Figure 4 ). This remained in use until Stonehouse’s promise could be kept, when the £70,000 budget was found, and in 1976 a UAX13 exchange using 450MHz radio links to the mainland was installed, adding two pay-phone trunk lines and six channels on the radio link. The MAX12 exchanges had been used by the GPO since 1938. A development of these unit automatic exchanges was a GPO-led project, and was based on Strowger exchanges. These were the first ‘modular’ units in the UK, designed to replace rural manual exchanges. As another interesting side note, Strowger exchanges were widely used globally, but the initial impetus to create these is an interesting story in itself, as is the background of its creator and namesake. Almon Brown Strowger was born in 1839 near Rochester, New York. Whilst little is known of his early life, he served and fought in the American Civil War, afterwards becoming a teacher, and later on, an undertaker. Anecdotally, Strowger’s undertaking business was losing out to a rival undertaker, whose telephone- operator wife was redirecting all related calls to her husband’s business. Frustrated and motivated to remove the intermediary operator, he invented the first automatic telephone exchange in 1889, received a patent in 1891, the same year establishing the Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company, and installing his first commercial exchange in 1892. Sometimes history, both the significant and the more mundane, has interesting and unusual elements that only become apparent when we dig below the surface. FIGURE 4: The first automatic telephone exchange on Rathlin Island, 1972.