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Reginald Fessenden
Who was Reginald Fessenden?
Reginald was a Canadian inventor who may have been the first to successfully broadcast voice and music over the radio.
Reginald also patented multiple devices in the fields of high-powered transmitting, sonar and television
Early Accomplishments
The young Reginald had limited scientific training and
pursued a goal to learn more about electrical field. He moved to New York to work with Thomas Edison and ended up as an assistant tester at Edison Machine Works. He proved to be very successful and later went on to work directly with Edison himself.
The First Audio Radio Transmission
Reginald began experimenting with radio in the late 1890s
and found that he could create a superior system than the spark-gap transmitter that was developed by Oliver Lodge and Marconi.
Fessenden joined the United States weather bureau in 1900 with the hopes of broadcasting weather reports with radio instead of using a telegraph. He quickly made advances in receiver technology as he tried to develop audio reception of signals.
On December 23rd 1900 Fessenden was experimenting with a high frequency spark transmitter successfully transmitted speech over the distance of a mile, however the audio was to distorted for commercial use but did show with some refinement it would be possible to transmit audio over radio signals.
Fessenden later went on to develop the rotary-spark transmitter as well as lower-powered continuous-wave alternator-transmitter that could be used for both telegraphic and audio transmissions. Fessenden thought that a continuous-wave transmitter that produced a pure sine-wave signal on a single frequency would be far more efficient, because it could be used for quality audio transmissions. After his death this theory would become the standard for radio signals but little credit was ever given to Fessenden.
The rotary-spark transmitter was something to be used until a superior transmitter could be perfected. 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 hertz, and greatly speed it up in order to create electrical currents at tens of kilohertz. The high-speed alternator would produce a steady radio signal when connected to an aerial. Then, by placing a carbon microphone in the transmission line, the strength of the signal could be varied in order to add sounds to the transmission. However, it would take years of expensive development before even a prototype alternator-transmitter would be ready.
Reginald Fessenden never met finacial success with his inventions in radio and eventually ceased his work with radio broadcasting and moved onto work in the field of sonar an developed the Fessenden Oscillator for submarines to signal each other, as well as locating icebergs, to help avoid another disaster like the one that sank Titanic. During World War I, Fessenden volunteered his services to the Canadian government and was sent to London, England where he developed a device to detect enemy artillery and another to locate enemy submarines. Fessenden hold over 500 patents and died in 1932 as the Father of Radio Broadcasting.
On December 24th Fessenden used an alternator-transmitter to send out a short broadcast It included a phonograph record of Ombra mai fu (Largo) by George Frideric Handel, followed by Fessenden himself playing the song O Holy Night on the violin. His broadcast was heard several hundred miles away, however accompanying the broadcast was a disturbing noise. This noise was due to irregularities in the transmitter he used. On December 31st a second short program was broadcast. The audience for both these transmissions was a number of shipboard radio operators along the East Coast of the United States. Fessenden claimed that the Christmas Eve broadcast had been heard "as far down" as Norfolk, Virginia, while the New Year Eve's broadcast had reached places in the Caribbean. These two broadcasts were barely noticed at the time and soon forgotten. There are no known accounts in any ships' radio logs or any literature, of the reported holiday demonstrations.