Look No Wires....

Ok so now we are stuck in 1878 and I don’t know about you but I’m finding it a bit hard not having much entertainment, so lets get back in our time machines and travel forwards, set your dials to 1899 - just a year after the Hoffman factory was built, so thats a 21 year jump! Fasten seat belts, check your rear view mirrors, switch all your power on, concentrate your minds, pull the throttle up and lets go.

Hang on tight, we’re going to go forwards past..... the first toilet paper being sold by a British company in 1880, the invention of Coca Cola in 1886, past the first thoughts of making glass contact lenses in 1888 - but it took another 60 years to actually make them! and also in 1888 the invention of the first paper drinking straw. Past the invention of the escalator in 1891, and the invention of basketball - which was invented by a Canadian PE teacher who wanted a sport for his students to play indoors in the winter.

So here we are in 1899 in Chelmsford where a chap called Guglielmo Marconi has arrived from Italy and opened the first radio factory in the world in a road just off Moulsham Street.

Now Marconi was working on some ideas to try and send a wireless signal over long distances and needed a big supply of electrical power - so why do you think he chose Chelmsford? yep he’d heard about our chap Colonol Crompton - the electrical whizz who was lighting up the streets with his power supplies - perfect for Marconi’s experiments!

So Marconi is designing and developing and inventing and experimenting like a madman and eventually in 1901 he proved everyone wrong and sent the first transmission of sound across the Atlantic. Everyone thought the radio signals would fly off into space and be lost forever but Marconi was convinced it would follow the curve of the earth and he was right.

From that very first experiment Marconi went on to develop wire...less transmission - (you might have heard some more mature folks call a radio a wireless - this is why) the name we know and use now RADIO was created by the Americans and comes from the word - radiation which describes the spreading out of signals through the air.

Are you keeping up fellow travellers ?!

Well the wireless signal became revoluntionery - it was used during the first world war to listen to messages and pass messages on and when the Titanic sunk the distress signals were sent by a Marconi trained wireless operator - and saved the lives of over 700 of its passengers and crew.

And then the idea of using radio as entertainment was talked about and boosh Marconi’s there experimenting and by 1920 the first entertainment broadcast was transmitted from Marconi's factory in Chelmsford by an opera singer called Dame Nellie Melba.

A bit of a Diva was our Nellie and rumour has it that when she was told her voice would be broadcast from the top of the tall radio mast she said "young man, if you think I'm going to climb up there you are greatly mistaken"!

Now, we're not going to start singing opera, but we are going to 'tune in' to our creative wavelengths and whisk up our own versions of the radar masts used to transmit signals. Lolly sticks, kebab sticks (without the spikes!), paper straws, elastic bands, modelling clay, and some good old masking tape - perfect for some sensational structures!

"I can't believe that Marconi chose Chelmsford to be the place to test his wireless out of the whole world!"