Improved communications at sea: a need and a new technology

The world's first radio company was registered in Britain in 1897. Many people then expected that conventional line telegraphs, with their costly paraphernalia of wires, posts and submarine cables, would soon be obsolete. But in practice, for more than twenty years, radio made little impact on existing telegraphs. It was used instead predominantly as a means of ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore signalling. By 1915 there were 4846 radio sets operating in ships and 706 coastal stations for maritime communications; in contrast only about 900 land-based stations were used for point-to point working, and there was only one regular transoceanic commercial radio telegraph. Financially and technologically, the radio industry which developed in the early decades of the twentieth century depended on marine communications.