Reginald Fessenden is the Canadian experimenter generally credited with transmitting the first wireless voice and music signals early in the 20th century. He later worked on submarine signaling devices.
Reginald Fessenden was an important wireless pioneer who developed several important radio devices (using his heterodyne and continuous wave innovations) early in the twentieth century. He was among the first to broadcast voice and music signals, in addition to more traditional telegraphic code.
Born in Quebec on 6 October 1866, Fessenden was introduced to electricity in 1886 when he began working for Thomas Edison’s company. By the early 1890s he had worked for Westinghouse and had published several articles and (though he lacked academic credentials) become a professor of electrical engineering, first at Purdue University and then, in 1893, at Western Pennsylvania University (later University of Pittsburgh). In 1900 he began contract wireless development work for the U.S. Weather Bureau. By mid-year he had managed to transmit the human voice to stations a mile apart near Rock Point, Maryland. In 1903 he became the chief researcher of the new National Electric Signal Company (NESCO) with financial support from two Pittsburgh financiers who sought to exploit his newly developed heterodyne principle, which allowed sending and receiving from the same antenna, a notion about a decade ahead of its time.
Fessenden also developed the idea of an alternator device to transmit continuous wave signals (this was further developed and improved by Ernst Alexanderson of General Electric) and a liquid barretter, or electrolytic detector of wireless signals, that was soon widely used by the U.S. Navy— which ignored his patent rights and purchased equipment from other sources. Navy officers also experimented extensively with the Fessenden devices at their research radio station (which became NAA) in Arlington, Virginia. Wartime Navy wireless employed equipment using Fessenden’s principles until replaced by vacuum tube devices.
NESCO built a number of coastal transmitters and experimented with transoceanic wireless telegraphy. Fessenden had also successfully transmitted voice and music signals on several occasions, some of them witnessed, by 1905. His difficult personality and lack of marketing ability (or interest), however, led to constant bickering with his own backers and many potential clients. Fessenden had largely left the wireless business (his bankrupt firm was sold for the patent rights it held—those rights ended up with Radio Corporation of America) by 1912, ironically just about the time the developing radio industry had begun to agree on the need for the continuous wave transmissions he had pioneered.
Fessenden’s final radio work involved the Submarine Signal Company of Boston, which he joined in 1912 to perfect underwater signal transmission and reception, naturally of interest to the Navy. With Navy support, the company tested the Fessenden Oscillator as a means of detecting icebergs, determining water depth, and locating submarines. Again, the Navy used his innovations without paying royalties or even granting him credit until decades later. Fessenden left the firm in 1921 and retired to Bermuda where he died on 23 July 1932.
Sources
Aitken, Hugh G. J. 1985. “Fessenden and the Alternator.” In The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900–1932. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fessenden, Helen M. 1940. Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows. New York: Coward McCann (reprinted by Arno Press, 1974).
Fessenden, R. A. 1899. “The Possibilities of Wireless Telegraphy.” Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 16: 607–651.
Howeth, L. S. 1963. History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Seitz, Frederick. 1999. The Cosmic Inventor: Reginald Aubrey Fessenden. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
