ir. This historic transmitter can be seen in the museum of the Dutch
Postal Services in the Hague.

The first transmissions of speech and music in England were made
from Chelmsford, Essex, when a 15kW transmitter of the Marconi Company
began regular transmissions in February of 1920.

In the summer of 1924 the world's greatest radio companies--British
Marconi, German Telefunken, French Radio Telegraphie and
American R.C.A.--met in London to discuss transatlantic
communications. The learned gentlemen all agreed that the Atlantic
could only be spanned by ultra-long waves of 10,000 to 20,000 metres,
which would require the use of hundreds of kilowatts of power and
receivers as large as a trunk, not to speak of antennas more than a
mile long. Dr. Frank Conrad, who was also present at the conference,
had brought with him a small short wave receiver less than a foot
square. When he connected it to a curtain rod as an antenna the faint
but clear voices of his assistants in the U.S.A. were heard from
nearly four thousand miles away. With this spectacular demonstration
he administered the deathblow to all plans for high power
ultra-long-wavelength transmitters, and from then on the commercial
companies concentrated their efforts on developing equipment for
international communications on the short waves.

With present-day electronic news gathering and world-wide
satellite links, the problems faced by broadcasting organisations
fifty years ago when transmitting programmes which did not originate
in a studio were thought to be very complex. In the B.B.C. Handbook
for 1928 there was an article entitled 'Outside Broadcast
Problems' which said,

"Work outside the studio is often the most difficult that the
broadcast engineer can be asked to undertake; not so much from a
technical as from a practical point of view. Very often he has to
take his apparatus to some place he has never seen before, set up his
amplifiers in most awkward positions, test his lines to the studio,
decide on his microphone placings and run out the wiring in the space
of an hour or so, with little previous experience to guide him. It is
in fairly echoey halls, theatres and churches that the majority of
outside broadcasts take place. For example, a sermon preached in a
church would be intelligible probably to the whole of the congregation.
But to render it intelligibly on a loud-speaker, the microphone would
have to be, say, not m