Message to space marks wireless centennial
Source: CNN.com
A century after Guglielmo Marconi ushered in the era of wireless communications, his daughter marked the centennial Saturday by greeting astronauts from close to the same spot where her father sent a historic radio transmission across the Atlantic.
"In this same spirit of his achievement, and also from Cape Cod, I send this wireless greeting to you in space. Cordial greetings, and good wishes," Princess Elettra Marconi told Kenneth Bowersox, commander of the international space station.
"It is amazing how far society and radio communications has come in the last 100 years. It is wonderful to hear your voice across the radio waves," Bowersox told the princess, who spoke from an auditorium filled with about 200 people.
The site is about five miles from the coastal bluff where Marconi sent the first wireless trans-Atlantic message: a Morse code greeting from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII of England on January 18, 1903.
The radio transmission was sent from the eastern end of the cape to Nova Scotia to Cornwall, England. In his message, Roosevelt called the achievement a "wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity."
