EDITOR'S NOTE: You won't see them in the Port Isabel skyline today, but years ago two massive radio towers stretched to the sky, one of the first attempts of the U.S. military to establish offshore communication with naval ships and forces outside our borders. This is the story... American military communications as a separate discipline began with Confederate forces in 1862 and the Union Signal Corps was to form in 1863. Innovations were to follow as methods advanced from flag and torch signaling to telegraph and numerous other inventive schemes. Few know of the important role that the United States Navy played in the development and perfection of long-range radio communications. Still fewer remember the Navy wireless transmission facility which constructed in the southwest portion of Port Isabel during the heighth of WOrld War I and during the uprising of Pancho Villa in Mexico. Its evolutionary background was definitively addressed by Captain Linwood S. Howeth in his 1963 book History of Communication-Electronics in the United States Navy, U. S. Government Printing Office. According to Howeth's published reports, the first electrical use in communications in the U.S. Navy was that of electrical signaling lights in 1875. It was the Spanish–American War which brought forth the establishment of coast signal stations. By April 1898, 230 land stations along the coasts of the country were tied together with telegraph and telephones and used various physical systems to communicate to ships off-shore. These stations, primarily lighthouses and weather service facilities, were manned by Navy personnel. The operation was termed the Coastal Signal System. The system, which we now call radio communication, consisted of the sending of electromagnetic waves created by a generator and received by a conductor connected to a suitable receiving circuit. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell had laid the scientific groundwork for electromagnetism in the mid-19th century. While others were to build upon their work such as Dr. Mahlon Loomis as early as 1872 to be followed by Amos Dolbear in 1882 and Phelps and Edison in 1885, it was Heinrich Hertz, before his death in 1884, that developed an oscillator for generating high-frequency electro-magnetic waves, essentially the first radio transmitter. America was at war with Grmany and just across the border, a revolution against the Mexican government threatened to spill over to U.S. soil - mainly in the Rio Grande Valley - and the military desperately needed a communication system that would connect central command to the ships at sea and the troops in the field. Recognizing the fact that it would be of great use to the service, U.S. Navy Lt. Bradley A. Fiske researched and experimented with wireless communications in the decade following 1885. His work therefore preceded that of Marchese Marconi. Marconi was less an inventor than an individual who could develop engineering and applied research. This in the 1890s he did, accumulating information on radio signaling from numerous individuals, including Prof. Popoff in Russia. The outcome was by July 1898 the steamer Flying Huntress became the first ship outfitted with radio for commercial purposes. By the middle of second deacde of the 20th century the U.S. began outfitting war ships with giant electronic electromagnetic receiving stations. (This is the same Arizona that was sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the second World War. Pictured above is the USS Arizona as it sailed from its birthing channel near New York harbor. Note the electronic tower array prominently displayed on its deck. This receiving station was designed to pick up the electronic signals transmitted from the new towers in Point Isabel. With the opening of the Panama Canal in August 1914 adequate communications between Washington and the Canal Zone became pressing, especially if war was to ensue. In preparing for the possible U. S. entrance into the Great War additional stations were constructed. The Navy Communication Service set up the Point Isabel Navy Wireless Station within the Eighth District having New Orleans as District Center. This district also operated stations in Pensacola, Florida and the Heald Bank (Texas) Lightship. The first inkling of the Navy's interest in the Point Isabel site is reported in the 1/15/14 issue of The Daily Sentinel, a Brownsville, Texas newspaper. It noted that the local engineer Kowalski, employed to survey the area for possible sites had recommended three alternative satisfactory locations at Point Isabel. In its 1/19/14 issue, the paper stated that Lt. Commander A. J. Hepburn was closeted with Point Isabel landowners to secure a wireless station site jointly owned by James B. Wells and Charles Champion. The latter had delivered an option for his half undivided interest at a very low price and even stated that he was willing to donate the land to the Navy if necessary. H. Skelton who previously held an option on the site from Champion had relinquished it upon learning of the Navy's interest. The paper went on to report the background for the siting. The Point Isabel Station would be in almost a direct line with the station on the California coast and one at Panama so would occupy the most strategic position of any wireless in the United States. If established it would put the three sites, the one on the Pacific coast, the one at Arlington (Virginia), and the proposed one at Point Isabel in a V shape covering the whole of North America. It was hinted that its establishment might even entice the Navy to improve the harbor at Brazos Santiago. A May 18,1916 newspaper article tells something of the logistics involved in the station's erection. Headlined: "Heavy Machinery Rushed to Point for Big Wireless", the article went on to relate: The Rio Grande Railway Company is preparing to handle heavy shipments of machinery and other equipment for the great government wireless plant that is being rushed to completion at Point Isabel. Officers of the road stated yesterday that most of the machinery has been received in the local yards and was now being loaded on cars preparatory to shipment to the Point. One indication of the great size and capacity of the plant can be gained from the size of the engine alone which weighs 27,000 lbs. Other machinery and equipment is massive and heavy in proportion. The Point Isabel plant, which will be one of the transcontinental stations is being rushed to early completion and should be in operation within a few weeks. Less than a month later the same paper headlined this item: "President Asks Haste on Radio at Point Isabel". This article read: Work on the government's great radio station at Point Isabel is being rushed with all possible dispatch, and one of its 330-foot towers has been completed and work has been begun on the other. Workmen are putting in ten hours per day on the job, and a night shift would be used if there were electric lights. The unusual rush to complete the station is the result of instructions from President Wilson himself, who asked all possible speed be made. Extraordinary precautions have been taken to safeguard the giant steel towers that are pushing skyward. Arms and ammunition have been issued to every man on the job while sandbags have been provided for defense in case of attack. The urgency involved the considerable military operations then being conducted along the border and even into Mexico in pursuit of bandits, revolutionaries, and others making incursions into the U.S. To help augment the station's communication with the outside world a new telegraph line was completed from Brownsville to the wireless station on 6/29/16. A lesser wireless station at Fort Brown had received its first ever transmission (from Arlington VA) on 10/7/14. The towers were shut and down and moved to Fort Brown by 1923. But for long the great towers of the Point served as a reminder of the role Port Isabel played in the development of the U.S. military's electronic communications system.