transmission distance for radio waves. Marconi raised the height of his antenna and hit upon the idea of grounding his transmitter and receiver. With these improvements the system was capable of transmitting signals up to and over hills. This apparatus proved to be the first engineering-complete, commercially successful radio transmission system and Marconi went on to receive British patent 12039, Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and in apparatus there-for, in 1896 Nautical and transatlantic transmissions In 1897, Marconi established a radio station on the Isle of Wight, England and opened his "wireless" factory in the former silk-works at Hall Street, Chelmsford, England, in 1898, employing around 60 people. On 12 December 1901, using a kite-supported antenna for reception—signals transmitted by the company's new high-power station at Poldhu, Cornwall, Marconi transmitted a message across the Atlantic ocean to Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland. Marconi began to build high-powered stations on both sides of the Atlantic to communicate with ships at sea. In 1904, he established a commercial service to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which could incorporate them into their on-board newspapers. A regular transatlantic radio-telegraph service was finally begun on 17 October 1907 between Clifden, Ireland, and Glace Bay, but even after this the company struggled for many years to provide reliable communication to others. Marconi's apparatus is also credited with saving the 700 people who survived the tragic Titanic disaster. Audio transmission In the late 1890s, Canadian-American inventor Reginald Fessenden came to the conclusion that he could develop a far more efficient system than the spark-gap transmitter and coherer receiver combination. To this end he worked on developing a high-speed alternator (referred to as "an alternating-current dynamo") that generated "pure sine waves" and produced "a continuous train of radiant waves of substantially uniform strength", or, in modern terminology, a continuous-wave (CW) transmitter. While working for the United States Weather Bureau on Cobb Island, Maryland, Fessenden researched using this setup for audio transmissions via radio. By fall of 1900, he successfully transmitted speech over a distance of about 1.6 kilometers (one mile), which appears to have been the first successful audio transmission using radio signals. Although successful, the sound transmitted was far too distorted to be commercially practical. According to some sources, notably Fessenden's wife Helen's biography, on Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden used an Alexanderson alternator and rotary spark-gap transmitter to make the first