October 17 in business history: twelve words a minute, a warning already on file, and a market with no shops
Marconi's first commercial transatlantic wireless service, the Hatfield rail crash and Canada's legal cannabis market each show what happens when someone is handed a market without the machine that serves it.
Three 17 Octobers, three parties handed a market and not the machine that serves it. A wireless route in 1907, a railway in 2000, a legal cannabis market in 2018.
The route that could carry twelve words a minute
On 17 October 1907 the Marconi station at Port Morien, near Glace Bay in Nova Scotia, opened for public use. Its partner station stood at Clifden in County Galway, and together they formed the first regular commercial transatlantic wireless service. 1
The opening rate was five cents a word for press messages, about eight cents from New York to London once land tolls were added. 2 Ten thousand words of press dispatches moved across in a day. 2 One contemporary magazine account dates the first paid dispatch to the following morning. 2
The limit was throughput and trust. A Cape Breton newspaper timed an operator's message to Clifden at ten or twelve words a minute. 3 The cables carried thousands of words a minute, and nobody had solved keeping a wireless message private. 2
The cable companies called the wireless a supplement rather than a rival. They watched it closely — "plotting, it may be, to get possession of his patents when the time shall come." 2
So the revenue came from somewhere else. The practical business of wireless was fitting it to ships at sea, with a Marconi operator aboard most vessels. 4 The announced market was the transatlantic post. The paying one was the fleet.
Decision mirror: The queue for grid connections works the same way. At the end of 2025, more than 2,060 gigawatts of generation and storage in the United States were waiting for a transmission connection. 5 Only 13% of the capacity that asked for one between 2000 and 2020 was operating by the end of 2025. 5 For projects finished in 2025, the median wait from request to operation was over five years. 5
The railway whose owner had sold its engineers
At 12:23 on 17 October 2000, the 12:10 King's Cross to Leeds express struck a cracked rail south of Hatfield at about 117 mph. 6 The train broke into three sections and ran on for a further thousand yards. 7 Four passengers died, and the official investigation counted more than seventy injured. 7
The failure had been forecast. In December 1999 Railtrack, the private company that owned the track, warned in writing about this type of fatigue. 7 Its own line specification, the company said, was not sufficient to guard against it. 7 Replacement rails had been made available and were never delivered to the site. 7
The company had sold the knowledge that would have found it. Railtrack had moved British Rail's engineering out to contractors after privatisation. 7 The manager responsible for quality standards in the zone told investigators he had no knowledge of railway engineering or railway safety. 7 In May 1999 the head of track had said that insufficiently skilled work was producing more broken rails. 7
Railtrack could not say how many other rails were in the same state. 7 It imposed more than 1,800 emergency speed restrictions and began replacing track across the network. 7
Train operators lost about 19% of their revenue in the year that followed. 7 The repairs and compensation cost £733 million. 6 The disruption was estimated to cost the wider economy £6 million a day. 7
Railtrack had been a FTSE 100 company. It went into administration on 7 October 2001, and Network Rail bought it on 3 October 2002. 8
In October 2003 Network Rail took maintenance back in house, absorbing 18,500 contractor staff. 9 It expected to save £200 million to £300 million a year out of a £1.2 billion budget. 9 Balfour Beatty, the contractor at the site, was fined £10 million in 2005; Network Rail was fined £3.5 million. 7
Decision mirror: Boeing agreed in July 2024 to buy back Spirit AeroSystems for $4.7 billion in stock. 10 The total came to about $8.3 billion including the supplier's net debt. 10 Spirit was formed in June 2005, when Boeing sold the Wichita operations that supply its commercial airplanes. 11 Boeing's chief executive said reintegrating it would let the company "fully align" its production and quality systems. 10
The market that opened with almost no shops
The Cannabis Act came into force on 17 October 2018, making Canada the second country after Uruguay to legalise recreational cannabis. 12 Ottawa framed it as a way to cut into the billions of dollars changing hands in the illicit market. 12
On the day, the biggest province had nowhere to buy. Ontario had no store at all, and the Ontario Cannabis Store website was the only legal route until at least April 2019. 12 British Columbia had one, in Kamloops. 12
Manitoba's lottery corporation had warned of "substantially less cannabis than originally requested." 12 Customers came anyway. One shop in St John's sold about $9,000 of stock in the two hours before its compulsory 2 a.m. close. 12
The border security minister, Bill Blair, said the old arrangement "will not change overnight." 12 He was right about the timing and wrong about the direction.
By 2024, 72% of Canadians who had used cannabis in the previous year usually bought it from a legal store or website. 13 That was up from 4% in 2018. 13 Three per cent bought from an illegal source, down from 28%. 13
The machine got built, over six years and a great deal of other people's money.
Decision mirror: Germany legalised on 1 April 2024 and chose not to build it. The law allowed home growing, and non-commercial cultivation clubs from July, but no shops. 14 The first federal evaluation put 2024 demand at 670 to 823 tonnes. Clubs supplied less than 0.1% of it. 14
Three questions for the day
- What were you actually handed — the right to serve this market, or the ability to serve it?
- Which part of the machine did you sell, and who can now see what you can no longer see?
- If your new market opened tomorrow, what could a customer actually buy?
References
- 1
- 2The World's Work, "Transatlantic Marconigrams Now and Hereafter," December 1907
earlyradiohistory.us
- 3Sydney Daily Post, 24 October 1907
nshdpi.ca
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7Wikipedia, "Hatfield rail crash"
en.wikipedia.org
- 8Wikipedia, "Railtrack"
en.wikipedia.org
- 9
- 10Boeing, "Boeing to Acquire Spirit AeroSystems," 1 July 2024
investors.boeing.com
- 11
- 12
- 13Health Canada, "Cannabis use in Canada: Key findings"
health-infobase.canada.ca
- 14Cannabis Health News, "Germany Publishes First Data on Cannabis Reforms," 7 October 2025
cannabishealthnews.co.uk
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