Madam, – The Irish rebels of 1916 were not responsible for the world’s first radio broadcast. The erroneous claim that they were was repeated most recently in an article by Mick O’Farrell, author of the newly-released 50 Things You Didn’t Know about 1916 (Weekend Review, April 18th).
What the rebels actually used was a ship’s transmitter in Dublin to send out messages about their military action, by Morse code dots and dashes on the shipping wavelength, for up to 24 hours.
As Maurice Gorham (former director of broadcasting at Radio Éireann, 1953-59) pointed out in 1967 in his Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting, ships’ wireless operators were not in the habit of getting news of this description through their receiving sets. Morse code was an imaginative way of circumventing wartime censorship. However, Mr Gorham also noted, this was not broadcasting as we know it .
Had the rebels been real radio revolutionaries they would have used not wireless telegraphy (which due to Marconi and others was scarcely in its infancy as Mr O’Farrell suggests) but wireless telephony (broadcasting as we know it).
Mr O’Farrell’s further claim that the rebels’ action is widely accepted as being the world’s first radio broadcast may come as a surprise to many who believe that the so-called Father of Radio Broadcasting, Canadian Reginald Fessenden, made the world’s first radio broadcast on Christmas Eve 1906. This included his singing of O Holy Night!, while accompanying himself on the violin, and he is said to have been heard by ships at sea a decade before 1916.
Mr O’Farrell also repeats the claim that firing stopped around St Stephen’s Green in 1916 to allow the park’s ducks to be fed. It was clearly a good year for ducks as the canard born out of it relating to radio continues to fly. – Yours, etc,