MOUNT VERNON — It’s remarkable how much technology changed from the 19th century into the 20th.
Mount Vernon resident Robert Clarke could have testified to the amazing developments, because his life covered the same trajectory.
Clarke was born in 1840 in Pennsylvania and served as a lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Artillery, Battery A, during the Civil War.
An early photo of this battery survives from the Battle of Seven Pines on June 1, 1862, and Lt. Clarke can be seen on the left. That battle, incidentally, was a big one, the culmination of the Union’s Peninsula Campaign. Though over 11,000 casualties were incurred in the battle, it was a tactical stalemate.
After the war, Clarke moved to Ohio and married Mary Norton Hurd. They had three children, one of whom was Mary Norton Clarke, who later married George Dunham of Mount Vernon.
The Dunhams had a chance to make a little local history when they were on a European trip on the ship HMS Oceanic, a boat of the White Star Line in 1910.
The Oceanic was the largest ship in the world when it was launched in 1899, though the record was soon taken by other craft. Infamously, the White Star Line broke the record again in 1912 with their ship the HMS Titanic, and everyone knows what happened on that ship’s maiden voyage.
One of the things which helped the loss of life be less than it could have been when the Titanic sank was the use of the new technology, the wireless radio, to call for assistance from other ships.
While sending telegraphs over wires was a well-established technology by the turn of the century, the new breakthrough was the wireless radio, first demonstrated in a ship-to-shore message sent by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1897.
As far as is known, the first involvement in land-locked Mount Vernon with this technology was in 1910, when Mary Norton Dunham decided to send a telegram to greet her father while she and her husband were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on the HMS Oceanic.
According to the news item that appeared in the Democratic Banner on Dec. 6, 1910, Mary dictated a note of greeting to the ship’s radio operator, who transmitted it in Morse code to the on-shore receiver on Cape Race, Newfoundland.
This radio receiving station was built in 1904 at the Cape Race Lighthouse, and was the first transatlantic radio communication tower. From Cape Race, the radio operator sent Mary’s message via conventional ground telegraph to the Western Union station in Columbus, Ohio.
From Columbus, the message was relayed to the local Western Union office in Mount Vernon, printed, and hand delivered to Robert Clarke’s home on North Main Street.
It must have been a startling encounter with the modern world for an old soldier who led a Civil War artillery battery that dragged its cannon around with horses 50 years earlier.
