New Brunswick Marconi Station

History

Ground was broken for the site on April 9, 1913, by the American Marconi Wireless Corporation. The station was completed in 1914.

After the partial failure of transatlantic telegraph cables, the facility was confiscated by the United States Navy on April 7, 1917 to provide transatlantic communications during World War I. The New Brunswick Naval Radio Station was the principal wartime communication link between the United States and Europe, using the callsign NFF. President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech was transmitted to Europe from the New Brunswick Naval Radio Station in 1918. After the war, ownership of the station, along with Marconi's other US assets, were transferred from the Navy to RCA. The antenna masts were demolished in 1952 to make room for what is now a small mall containing a Kmart, but the buildings on the other side of JFK Boulevard were spared. All but one of the brick buildings were demolished around 2004 to make way for a storage locker facility. The bricks and tiles were saved for use in any future restoration of the spared building, and the Marconi facility in Belmar, New Jersey.

The station used a huge 5,000-foot-long (1,500 m) antenna supported by eight 400-foot (120 m) steel masts, similar to the AT&T long wave telephone transmitter at RCA's Rocky Point, Long Island transmitter facility. During World War I the original Marconi spark transmitter was replaced with an Alexanderson alternator, the invention of the General Electric engineer, with an output power of 200 kilowatts and looking like an ordinary power station generator. Its frequency was around 17 kHz, which made its wavelength around 17,500 meters.