Reginald A Fessenden
Professor Reginald A Fessenden.
1866 - 1932.

Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was born in East Bolton, Quebec, Canada on October 6, 1866. The eldest of 4 children born to Elisha Joseph and Clementina Trenholme Fessenden.

Young Reginald was an accomplished student. In 1877, he attended Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario for two years. At the age of 14, he was granted a mathematics mastership to Bishop's College (now Bishop's University) in Lennoxville, Quebec. At the age of 18, Reginald left Bishop's without having been awarded a degree, even though he had "done substantially all the work necessary".

The next two years he worked as the principal, and sole teacher, at the Whitney Institute in Bermuda. While there, he became engaged to Helen Trott. They married in September, 1890, and later had a son, Reginald Kennelly Fessenden.

Fessenden's classical education had only provided basic scientific and technical training. Interested in increasing his skills in the electrical field, he moved to New York City in 1886, with hopes of gaining employment with the famous inventor Thomas Edison. In his first application, Fessenden wrote "Do not know anything about electricity, but can learn pretty quick", to which Edison replied "Have enough men now who do not know about electricity". However, Reginald persevered, and before the end of the year was hired in a semi-skilled position as an assistant tester for the Edison Machine Works, which was laying underground electrical mains (Direct Current) in New York City. He quickly proved his worth, receiving a series of promotions with increasing responsibility for the project. In late 1886, Fessenden began working directly for Edison at the inventor's new Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. A broad range of projects included work in solving problems in chemistry, metallurgy, and electricity. However, in 1890, facing financial problems, Edison was forced to lay off most of the Laboratory employees, Fessenden included.

Taking advantage of this recent practical experience, Fessenden was able to find positions with a series of manufacturing companies and, in 1892, he received an appointment as professor for the newly formed Electrical Engineering department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Whilst he was there he helped the Westinghouse Corporation install the lighting for the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, George Westinghouse personally recruited Fessenden for the newly created position of chair of the Electrical Engineering department at the Western University of Pennsylvania (today the University of Pittsburgh).

In the late 1890s, he began to read reports about the successes Guglielmo Marconi was having in developing a practical radio transmitting and receiving system. Fessenden began limited radio experimentation and soon decided that he could develop a more efficient system than the spark-gap transmitter and coherer-receiver combination which had been championed by Oliver Lodge and Marconi.

The very first radio voice transmission actually happened at Cobb Island, MD on December 23rd of 1900, while he was under contract to the United States Weather Bureau. His objective was to set up radio-telegraph links to provide remote weather observations but he used some time and effort to explore and actually produce voice over radio. He was experimenting with a receiving station at Arlington, Virginia, fifty miles away. He and his assistant Thiessen had perfected Morse transmissions using a new generator they had bought. Fessenden experimentally hooked up a microphone to the improved system and said into his microphone, "One, two, three, four. Is It snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If so telegraph back and let me know." Thiessen replied by telegraph in Morse code that it was indeed snowing. In great excitement Fessenden wrote at his desk, "This afternoon here at Cobb Island, intelligible speech by electromagnetic waves has for the first time in World's History been transmitted." This was almost a year before Marconi's transmission in Morse code from England to Signal Hill in Newfoundland, on December 12,1901.

In late 1902, after a 'falling out' with the United States Weather Bureau, two wealthy Pittsburgh businessmen, Hay Walker, Jr., and Thomas H. Given, financed the formation of the National Electric Signaling Company (NESCO), to carry on Fessenden's research that he had made at the Weather Bureau, including the development of both a high-power rotary-spark transmitter for long-distance radiotelegraph service, and a lower-powered continuous-wave alternator-transmitter, which could be used for both telegraphic and audio transmissions. Marshfield's Brant Rock, Massachusetts became the center of operations for the new company.

It was decided to try to establish a transatlantic radio-telegraph service and, in January 1906, useing rotary-spark transmitters of his own design, Fessenden made the first successful two-way transatlantic transmission, exchanging Morse code messages between a station constructed at Brant Rock and an identical one built at Machrihanish in Scotland. (Marconi had only achieved one-way transmissions at this time.) However, the transmitters could not bridge this distance during daylight hours or in the summer, so work was suspended until later in the year. In November he received a "personal" registered letter from his engineer, Armour, at Machrihanish which both delighted and shocked him. The letter said,
"..... at about 4 o'clock in the morning I was listening in for telegraph signals from Brant Rock when to my astonishment I heard instead of dots and dashes, the voice of Mr. Stein telling the operators at Plymouth how to run the dynamo. At first I thought I must be losing my senses, but I'm sure it was Stein's voice for it came in as clearly as if he were in the next room....."
Fessenden frantically checked the logs which recorded the various tests and satisfied himself that he'd actually invented equipment which could and did transmit voices across to Scotland. It had been a happy accident.

Another accident now took place which stopped Fessenden cold. On 6th December 1906 distaster struck, "owing to the carelessness of one of the contractors employed in shifting some of the supporting cables" (according to one source) "a storm" (according to another), the Machrihanish radio tower collapsed, abruptly ending the transatlantic work before it could ever go into commercial service.

Fessenden learned that Marconi had been given exclusive rights to build wireless stations in Canada. The idea that Marconi, an Italian, received not only the approval but support of the Canadian government which Fessenden, a Canadian, had been denied, infuriated and frustrated the inventor. He had to prove his genius, prove to the world and Canada that he was the real inventor of radio.

Fessenden felt that a continuous-wave transmitter that produced a pure sine-wave signal on a single frequency would be far more efficient than the spark transmitter, particularly because it could be used for quality audio transmissions. His design idea was to take a basic electrical alternator, which normally operated at speeds that produced alternating current of at most a few hundred cycles-per-second, and greatly speed it up in order to create electrical currents of tens-of-thousands of cycles-per-second. Thus, the high-speed alternator would produce a steady radio signal when connected to an aerial. Then, by simply placing a carbon microphone in the transmission line, the strength of the signal could be varied in order to add sounds to the transmission, in other words amplitude modulation would be used to add the audio to the radio signal. However, it would take many years of expensive development before even a prototype alternator-transmitter would be ready, and a few more years beyond that for high-power versions to become available.

Fessenden requested a faster, more powerful unit after General Electric delivered a 10,000 cycle version which proved of limited use and could not directly be used as a radio transmitter. The request was assigned to E. F. W. Alexanderson, and in August, 1906 he delivered an improved model which operated at a transmitting frequency of approximately 50,000 cycles-per-second (50 kHz), although with far less power than Fessenden's rotary-spark transmitters.
The alternator-transmitter achieved the goal of transmitting quality audio signals, but the lack of any way to amplify the signals meant they were somewhat weak. On December 21, 1906, Fessenden made an extensive demonstration of the new alternator-transmitter at Brant Rock, showing its utility for point-to-point wireless telephony, including interconnecting his stations to the wire telephone network.

A few days later, two additional demonstrations took place, which appear to be the first audio radio broadcasts of entertainment and music ever made to a general audience. (Beginning in 1904, the U.S. Navy had broadcast daily time signals and weather reports, but these employed spark transmitters, transmitting in Morse code). On the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), Fessenden used the alternator-transmitter to send out a short program from Brant Rock, which included his playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible. On December 31, New Year's Eve, a second short program was broadcast. The main audience for both these transmissions was an unknown number of shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast. Although now seen as a landmark, these two broadcasts were barely noticed at the time and soon forgotten, the only first-hand account appears to be a letter Fessenden wrote in January 1932 to one of his former associates, Samuel M. Kinter. There are no known accounts in any ships radio logs, nor any contemporary literature, of the reported holiday demonstrations. In addition, Fessenden does not appear to have made any additional broadcasts intended for a general audience, and was actually promoting the alternator-transmitter as ideal for point-to-point wireless telephone service. Although primarily designed for transmissions spanning a few kilometers, on a couple of occasions the test audio transmissions from Brant Rock were apparently heard by NESCO employee James C. Armor across the Atlantic at the Machrihanish site.

An avid 'tinkerer', Fessenden held over 500 patents.
Some of Fessendens achivements:
fessenden commemorative stamp
In 1987 Canada issued stamps to commemorate Fessendens achievement with radio.

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