Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

Many of the features that made Cornwall attractive to cable operators also made it a suitable place to conduct transatlantic radio experiments, and so in 1900 Guglielmo Marconi himself established a laboratory on Lizard Point, which is directly across the bay from Porthcurno, some 30 kilometers distant. Marconi had another station on the Isle of Wight, a few hundred kilometers to the east, and when he succeeded in sending messages between the two, he constructed a more powerful transmitter at the Lizard station and began trying to send messages to a receiver in Newfoundland. The competitive threat to the cable industry could hardly have been more obvious, and so the Eastern Telegraph Company raised a 60-meter mast above its Porthcurno site, hoisted an antenna, and began eavesdropping on Marconi’s transmissions. A couple of decades later, after the Italian had worked the bugs out of the system, the government stepped in and arranged a merger between his company and the submarine cable companies to create a new, fully integrated communications monopoly called Cable & Wireless.