Five years ago we went on holiday to Cape Cod, rented a car and trundled out to the Wellfleet Marconi Site. There's not a lot there. It's a place "where a man may stand and put all of America behind him". It's where Marconi first (or sort of, almost first) transmitted Transatlantic messages.
A little hut, a model, a phone line you can call to hear about it all, a plaque.
It was atmospheric though, there was enough to help you imagine the struggle and the excitement of those first transmissions across the Atlantic. (Sadly, now, apparently, it's mostly fallen into the sea.)
Last week we went to the other end - the Marconi Centre at Poldhu in Cornwall:
There's a bit more here. A little centre staffed by local hams and enthusiasts that will show you a video about Marconi, featuring a small collection of Morse code transmitters.
I like this long slow way to do tourism, seeing each end of invisible infrastructural things.
While we were in Cornwall we also stopped at Goonhilly and the Telegraph Museum at Porthcurno. I need, eventually, to find where in New York that Telstar transmission came from and what was on the end of those cables.
