Massie Wireless Station

About this property

The Massie Wireless Station (PJ) was built in Point Judith, Rhode Island, in 1907 and may be the oldest surviving working wireless station in the world. It is named for inventor Walter Wentworth Massie, president of the Massie Wireless Telegraph Company. The structure was moved to the New England Wireless and Steam Museum in 1983 where it is preserved as a technology museum and historic site. In December 1902 the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company set up an earlier station in an existing house on a beach near Point Judith Light and another near Block Island Southeast Light, 15 miles (24 km) from the coast. By May 1903 they had successfully exchanged test messages. Messages were sent using Morse code. The stations were initially operated for the Providence Journal to send news stories to the island to be printed locally. Another goal was that passing ships could also send messages to the mainland which would then be relayed to Providence or New York City by telephone arriving hours before the ships reached port. At this time few places in the world were passed by so many ships as Block Island. The Block Island Wireless began publishing in July. At the time it was one of only two daily newspapers that printed dispatches sent by wireless. The stations soon began sending messages (called "aerograms") for the public and charging a fee for the service. Initially, this experimental wireless service was only intermittently successful and the Block Island Wireless ceased publication at the end of August 1903. The Journal, dissatisfied with the operation, offered management of the two stations to the recently formed Massie company. By 1904 the new equipment installed by Massie to replace the de Forest system enabled reliable two-way communication between the island and the mainland. The stations also provided communications to passenger steamships, particularly those of the Fall River Line. When Massie equipped the steamship Plymouth with wireless it was the first Long Island Sound steamer to have this capability. A Massie employee was stationed on the ship as the wireless operator. During initial tests the coast station was able to communicate with the ship at a distance of 33 miles (53 km). The crews on these ships considered Point Judith to be a dangerous point on this route. The shore station would advise them of adverse weather conditions such as fog hours before they reached it. The station would then aide in navigation as it passed. By 1905 with improvements to the station at Block Island it was able to detect signals from approaching ocean liners beyond the Nantucket Shoals Lightship 66 – a distance of 150 miles (240 km).

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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