Are you receiving me?

The walk east from the Lizard lighthouse on the southernmost tip of Cornwall takes you along a spectacular stretch of cliff path high above the rocky shore. A week or so ago, on the hottest day of the year, I walked that stretch with a wildflower book in my pocket through drifts of sea campion and pink thrift and thickets of foxgloves. At one point the path dips steeply down to the golden sand of Housel Bay and then back up toward Bass Point. There you come across two small wooden huts that were built at the turn of the last century. Both are owned by the National Trust. One is a holiday cottage, the other houses some bare tables and shelves displaying brass and wooden scientific instruments – a primitive radio transmitter, a morse code inker, and a receiver comprising a vacuum tube filled with granules of nickel and silver and a connecting wire. 

It was in this hut in 1901 that a recent Italian immigrant to Britain, Guglielmo Marconi – then 26, and dismissed in his home country for his wild theories – picked up a wireless radio signal from the Isle of Wight, 196 miles away. This faint message proved his contention that radio waves could be sent and received beyond the curve of the horizon. 

Standing at the window looking out to the same sea, you get a sudden sharp sense of just how magical that moment must have seemed – the instant that the era of modern communication began. It seems fitting, too, that these crafted instruments are preserved in a shed, where all the best ideas occur. Marconi, the original tech bro, had high hopes for his breakthrough: “The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible because it will make war ridiculous,” he announced. Within a decade or so he was on manoeuvres as an officer in the Italian navy. 

You are reminded, too, on this remote clifftop how, since then, technological innovation has never spread evenly, either in space or time. On the walk back to the lighthouse, I take a picture on my phone of three seals clambering about on the rocks below. I try to share it with my family group chat, but I can’t for the life of me get a signal.