The Wireless Operator of Santiago

About this book:

1898. Santiago de Cuba. The world's first wireless telegraph station hums to life on a cliff above the Caribbean—just as the Spanish-American War erupts around it.

Arthur Finch didn't come to Oriente Province to fight. He came to prove Marconi's radical invention could punch sixty miles through tropical static to Jamaica, securing a commercial contract for the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. But the Sierra Maestra mountains swallow signals, Spanish officers mistake his coherers for rebel munitions, and the USS *Maine* has just blown up in Havana harbor. As American battleships gather at the horizon and Cuban insurgents close in from the hills, Arthur's "meteorological equipment" becomes the only link between a besieged city and the outside world.

From the foggy workshops of Chelmsford to the fever-ridden streets of Santiago, from the cliffs of Aguadores to the surrender at San Juan Hill, *The Wireless Operator of Santiago* plunges you into the birth of modern communication amid the death throes of empire. Meticulously researched and crackling with the hiss and spark of history's first radio war, this is the story of the messages that changed everything—the ones sent, the ones intercepted, and the ones that never made it through.