Mr. Marconi kept his own counsel regarding his plans in coming to Newfoundland in December, 1901. He told nobody, except his assistants, that he was going to attempt the great feat of communicating across the Atlantic Ocean. Though feeling very certain of success, he knew that the world would not believe him, would perhaps only laugh at him for his great plans. The project was entirely too daring for public announcement. Something might happen, some accident to the apparatus, that would cause a delay; people would call this failure, and it would be more difficult another time to get any one to put confidence in the work. So Marconi very wisely held his peace, only announcing what he had done when success was assured. Mr. Marconi landed at St. John's, Newfoundland, on December 6, 1901, with his two assistants, Mr. Kemp and Mr. Paget. He set up his instruments in a low room of the old barracks on Signal Hill, which stands sentinel at the harbour mouth half a mile from the city of St. John's. So simple and easily arranged is the apparatus that in three days' time the inventor was prepared to begin his experiments. On Wednesday, the 11th, as a preliminary test of the wind velocity, he sent up one of his kites, a huge hexagonal affair of bamboo and silk nine feet high, built on the Baden-Powell model: the wind promptly snapped the wire and blew the kite out to sea. He then filled a 14-foot hydrogen balloon, and sent it upward through a thick fog bank. Hardly had it reached the limit of its tetherings, however, when the aërial wire on which he had depended for receiving his messages fell to the earth, the balloon broke away, and was never seen again. On Thursday, the 12th, a day destined to be important in the annals of invention, Marconi tried another kite, and though the weather was so blustery that it required the combined strength of the inventor and his assistants to manage the tetherings, they succeeded in holding the kite at an elevation of about 400 feet. Marconi was now prepared for the crucial test. Before leaving England he had given detailed instructions to his assistants for the transmission of a certain signal, the Morse telegraphic S, represented by three dots (...), at a fixed time each day, beginning as soon as they received word that everything at St. John's was in readiness. This signal was to be clicked out on the transmitting instruments near Poldhu, Cornwall, the southwestern tip of England, and radiated from a number of aërial wires pendent from masts 210 feet high. If the inventor could receive on his kite-wire in Newfoundland some of the electrical waves thus produced, he knew that he held the solution of the problem of transoceanic wireless telegraphy. He had cabled his assistants to begin sending the signals at three o'clock in the afternoon, English time, continuing until six o'clock; that is, from about 11.30 to 2.30 o'clock in St. John's. [Illustration: Preparing to Fly the Kite which Supported the Receiving Wire.