Wireless Priest: Archibald Shaw and the Maritime Wireless Telegraph Company
A strange episode in the early history of the province, Archibald Shaw, the first ordained priest of the province. For further information, Google the entry on Fr Shaw by J.F. McMahon for the Australian Dictionary of Biography and his chapter in Jim Littleton’s 2017 book, MISSIONARY DISCIPLES, SOME REMARKABLE MSC
Here is a new book on Fr Shaw.
Wireless Priest: Archibald Shaw and the Maritime Wireless Telegraph Company Paperback – July 11, 2024 by Matthew Ryan, published by Studio20.
Around 1910 a forward-thinking Catholic priest, Archibald Shaw, was experimenting with spark-gap wireless about a decade before broadcast radio took-off. He founded an engineering factory in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. Shaw was a missionary priest and his intention was to use the wireless sets he manufactured to keep in touch with distant missionaries throughout New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. He hoped that profits from his factory might bring his order's missionary accounts out of debt as well. Within a short time his business won a large tender to construct Australia's first Coastal Wireless Service established by the government in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster of 1912.
In the middle of 1916 became unconscious in the company of a man and two prostitutes in his room at the Melbourne Coffee Palace. A large sum of cash he withdrew from the bank two days prior could not be accounted for.
Shaw just completed the sale of Australia's first wireless manufacturing business to the Royal Australian Navy. He was about to return to Sydney and move to America with a girl to whom he was secretly engaged.
Five days later he is dead.
An ensuing Royal Commission into the purchase of his business reveals government corruption and results in the sacking of a Minister of the Crown and the resignation of a Tasmanian senator.
The mystery surrounding Shaw's death is never resolved. A police report has disappeared and the missing money is never traced.
An astonishing tale, meticulously researched: this is the extraordinary story of Archibald Shaw - orphan, missionary priest, wireless engineer, businessman and man of many secrets.
Matthew Ryan completed post-graduate studies in physics and theology and has a graduate certificate in documentary filmmaking. He is a Churchill Fellow and was the inaugural Science Teacher Fellow at the University of Sydney in the School of Physics. He is a licensed radio amateur and has conducted several contacts between students and astronauts aboard the International Space Station. He has built equipment powerful enough to bounce radio signals off the moon.
