Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was Reginald Aubrey Fessenden born?
Reginald Fessenden was born October 6, 1866, in East-Bolton, Quebec, the eldest of the Reverend Elisha Joseph Fessenden and Clementina Trenholme's four children. Elisha Fessenden was a Church of England in Canada minister, and the family moved to a number of postings throughout the province of Ontario.
In 1901 Reginald Aubrey Fessenden made a significant step toward the possibility of broadcasting when he succeeded in superimposing a human voice onto a continuous Hertzian wave. Success in this experiment created a need for more advanced equipment, including an alternating-current generator large enough to produce the necessary power to carry his transmissions. Fessenden received the backing of T.H. Given and Hay Walker Jr. who contributed money to purchase a powerful generator from General Electric. He had it installed at Brant Rock, MA, and at 9pm local time on December 24, 1906, he began a broadcast that could be heard by several United Fruit Company ships at sea. After an introduction, the program consisted of the following:
The broadcast with Christmas greetings and a request for listeners to write him and report on the broadcast wherever they were. Fessenden received letters from many of his listeners who heard him from as far away as the West Indies.
Anticipation of the 2006 centennial anniversary of Fessenden's reported broadcasts brought renewed interest, as well as additional questions. A key issue was why, despite Fessenden's assertion that the two programs had been widely heard, there did not appear to be any independent corroborating evidence for his account. (Even the Helen Fessenden biography relies exclusively on details contained in the January 29, 1932 letter used by the Kintner article.) There was general consensus in the centennial discussions that Fessenden had the technical means to make broadcasts, given the widespread reports about the success of the December 21 alternator-transmitter demonstrations. However, because of the station's very low power, even if the broadcasts had taken place it was questionable if the range could have matched Fessenden's claim of being heard hundreds of kilometers away.
Nortel, the Communications Research Centre, Alexander Graham Bell, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, Edward S. Rogers, Sr., Edward Samuel Rogers (Ted Rogers), Donald Hings, Robert W. (Bob) Jones, and Michael Kedar are among those honoured.
Fessenden contracted with General Electric (GE) to help design and produce a series of high-frequency alternator-transmitters. In 1903, Charles Proteus Steinmetz of GE delivered a 10kHz version which proved of limited use and could not be directly used as a radio transmitter. Fessenden's request for a faster, more powerful unit was assigned to Ernst F. W. Alexanderson, who in August 1906 delivered an improved model which operated at a transmitting frequency of approximately 50kHz, although with far less power than Fessenden's rotary-spark transmitters.
Reginald Fessenden patents Alexanderson alternator: used by Fessenden for his first radio broadcast. Sonar
The technical achievements made by Fessenden were not matched by financial success. Walker and Given continued to hope to sell NESCO to a larger company such as the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). After the December 21, 1906 demonstrations, AT&T was said to be planning to acquire NESCO, but financial setbacks caused the telephone company to reconsider, and NESCO was unable to find another buyer. There were growing strains between Fessenden and the company owners, and Fessenden's formation of the Fessenden Wireless Company of Canada in Montreal in 1906 may have led to suspicion that he was trying to freeze Walker and Given out of a potentially lucrative competing transatlantic service. The final break occurred in January 1911, when Fessenden was formally dismissed from NESCO. This resulted in his bringing suit against NESCO, for breach of contract. Fessenden won the initial court trial and was awarded damages; however, NESCO prevailed on appeal. To conserve assets, NESCO went into receivership in 1912, and Samuel Kintner was appointed general manager of the company. The legal stalemate would continue for over 15 years. In 1917, NESCO finally emerged from receivership, and was soon renamed the International Radio Telegraph Company. The company limped along for a few years, until it was sold to the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company in 1920, and the next year its assets, including numerous important Fessenden patents, were sold to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which also inherited the longstanding Fessenden legal proceedings. Finally, on March 31, 1928, Fessenden settled his outstanding lawsuits with RCA, receiving a significant cash settlement.[44]
While growing up, Fessenden attended a number of educational institutions. At the age of nine, he was enrolled in the DeVeaux Military school for a year. He next attended Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, from 1877 until the summer of 1879. He also spent a year working for the Imperial Bank at Woodstock, because he had not yet reached the age of 16 needed to enroll in college. At the age of fourteen, Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec, which was a feeder school for Bishop's College and shared the same campus and buildings, granted him a mathematics mastership.[2] Thus, while Fessenden was still a teenager, he taught mathematics to the younger students (some older than himself) at the School, while simultaneously studying with older students at the College.[3][4] At the age of eighteen, Fessenden left Bishop's without having been awarded a degree, although he had "done substantially all the work necessary", in order to accept a position at the Whitney Institute in Bermuda, where for the next two years he worked as the principal and sole teacher. (This lack of a degree may have hurt Fessenden's employment opportunities. When McGill University in Montreal established an electrical engineering department, his application to become its chairman was turned down.) While in Bermuda, he became engaged to Helen Trott.[5] They married in September 1890 and later had a son, Reginald Kennelly Fessenden.
The house was declared a National Historic Landmark on January 7, 1976, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in recognition that it is one of the few places with a long-term association with Fessenden.
On December 23, 1900, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden sent and received the first intelligible speech by electromagnetic waves on a pair of masts high and apart on Cobb Island.
Fessenden was using a spark transmitter with the Kintner-Brashear interrupter.
The person generally credited as the primary early developer of AM technology is Canadian-born inventor Reginald Fessenden. The original spark-gap radio transmitters were impractical for transmitting audio, since they produced discontinuous pulses known as "damped waves". Fessenden realized that what was needed was a new type of radio transmitter that produced steady "undamped" (better known as "continuous wave") signals, which could then be "modulated" to reflect the sounds being transmitted.
She was named in honor of Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, born in Brome County, Quebec, Canada, 6 October 1866. He served as head chemist with Thomas Edison's East Orange, New Jersey, laboratories. In 1890 he began concentrating on electrical engineering, and through the next years made many important inventions and improvements in existing devices. His great contributions in the field of radio (particularly the invention of radio-telephony were of marked benefit not only to the Navy but to all seamen. He died 22 July 1932, at his home on Bermuda.
Clementina Trenholm Fessenden, (4 May 1843 – 14 September 1918), was born at the village of Trenholm, Canada East and died at Hamilton, Ontario, author, social organiser. Also, mother of Reginald Fessenden, the radio pioneer. Buried in St John's Anglican cemetery, Ancaster, Ontario.
Fessenden's initial Weather Bureau work took place at Cobb Island, Maryland, located in the Potomac River about 80 kilometers (50mi) downstream from Washington, DC. As the experimentation expanded, additional stations were built along the Atlantic Coast in North Carolina and Virginia. However, in the midst of promising advances, Fessenden became embroiled in disputes with his sponsor. In particular, he charged that Bureau Chief Willis Moore had attempted to gain a half-share of the patents. Fessenden refused to sign over the rights, and his work for the Weather Bureau ended in August 1902.[12]
Reginald A. Fessenden was born Quebec in 1866, and entered Bishop's University as a precocious young mathematical prodigy, but left in 1884 without graduating. In 1886, he took a position at the Edison Machine Works, working for inventor Thomas Edison. During an academic period teaching at Purdue University and at the University of Pittsburgh, Fessenden engaged in research on the nascent subject of wireless telegraphy. Much of the rest of his life he was employed in industry, either directly or as a consultant, but was often living near poverty, and produced a stream of inventions. In 1904 he invented the rotary spark-gap transmitter, and in 1906 he built a large transmitter in Massachusetts from which he successfully made a voice transmission. He also discovered the means to recombine separate frequencies to form a coherent audible sound. At his death he was described by inventor and businessman Elihu Thomson as "the greatest wireless inventor of the age, greater than Marconi."
The invention of amplitude-modulated (AM) radio, so that more than one station can send signals (as opposed to spark-gap radio, where one transmitter covers the entire bandwidth of the spectrum) is attributed to Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest. On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden used an Alexanderson alternator and rotary spark-gap transmitter to make the first radio audio broadcast, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing "O Holy Night" on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.
In 1925, Radio News, saluting Fessenden as "one of the greatest American radio inventors", began a monthly autobiographical series titled "The Inventions of Reginald A. Fessenden", with the intention of publishing the completed installments as a book. However, instead of reviewing his radio work, Fessenden immediately went on a series of tangents, including discussions of which races he believed were the most capable of producing inventions, and the proper approach that government institutions should be taking in order to support inventors. (At the close of the seventh installment, Radio News included a disclaimer that it was "not responsible for any opinions expressed in Dr. Fessenden's article".)[49] After eleven installments Fessenden had only covered his life up to 1893, having discussed virtually nothing about radio, and the series was quietly terminated at this point.
On Christmas Eve 1906, Reginald Fessenden is said to have broadcast the first radio program, consisting of some violin playing and passages from the Bible. While Fessenden's role as an inventor and early radio experimenter is not in dispute, several contemporary radio researchers have questioned whether the Christmas Eve broadcast took place, or whether the date was in fact several weeks earlier. The first apparent published reference to the event was made in 1928 by H.P. Davis, Vice President of Westinghouse, in a lecture given at Harvard University. In 1932 Fessenden cited the Christmas Eve 1906 broadcast event in a letter he wrote to Vice President S.M. Kinter of Westinghouse. Fessenden's wife Helen recounts the broadcast in her book "Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows" (1940), eight years after Fessenden's death. The issue of whether the 1906 Fessenden broadcast actually happened is discussed in Donna Halper's article "In Search of the Truth About Fessenden" and also in James O'Neal's essays. An annotated argument supporting Fessenden as the world's first radio broadcaster was offered in 2006 by Dr. John S. Belrose, Radioscientist Emeritus at the Communications Research Centre Canada, in his essay "Fessenden's 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast."
A Fessenden oscillator is an electro-acoustic transducer invented by Reginald Fessenden, with development starting in 1912 at the Submarine Signal Company of Boston. It was the first successful acoustical echo ranging device. Similar in operating principle to a dynamic voice coil loudspeaker, it was an early kind of transducer, capable of creating underwater sounds and of picking up their echoes.
The Reginald A. Fessenden House is a historic house at 45 Waban Hill Road in the village of Chestnut Hill in Newton, Massachusetts. It was the residence from 1919 to his death in 1932 of the inventor Reginald A. Fessenden (1866–1932), called "the father of radio broadcasting," because he was the first to broadcast the human voice and music by radio. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 in recognition of Fessenden's accomplishments.
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden built a radio transmitting station with a high mast here in 1905 to transmit Wireless Telegraphy to a similar station at Brant Rock in Massachusetts, United States. An exchange of messages took place on 1 January 1906 but the mast blew down in a gale on 5 December 1906 and was never rebuilt.
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden built a radio transmitting station with a high mast here in 1905 to transmit Wireless Telegraphy to a similar station at Brant Rock in Massachusetts, United States. An exchange of messages took place on 1 January 1906 but the mast blew down in a gale on 5 December 1906 and was never rebuilt.
The first widely publicized information about Fessenden's early broadcasts did not appear until 1932, when an article prepared by former Fessenden associate Samuel M. Kintner, "Pittsburgh's Contributions to Radio", appeared in the December 1932 issue of The Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers.[34] This reviewed information included in a January 29, 1932 letter sent by Fessenden to Kintner. (Fessenden subsequently died five months before Kintner's article appeared). In this account, Fessenden reported that on the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), he had made the first of two radio broadcasts of music and entertainment to a general audience, using the alternator-transmitter at Brant Rock. Fessenden remembered producing a short program that included a phonograph record of Ombra mai fu (Largo) by George Frideric Handel, followed by Fessenden playing Adolphe Adam's carol O Holy Night on the violin and singing Adore and be Still by Gounod, and closing with a biblical passage: "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will" (Luke 2:14). He also stated that a second short program was broadcast on December 31 (New Year's Eve). The intended audience for both of these transmissions was primarily shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic seaboard. Fessenden claimed that the two programs had been widely publicized in advance, and the Christmas Eve broadcast had been heard "as far down" as Norfolk, Virginia, while the New Year Eve's broadcast had reached listeners in the West Indies.[35]
Beginning in 1961, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists has annually awarded its Reginald Fessenden Award to "a person who has made a specific technical contribution to exploration geophysics".[54] In 1980, a Fessenden-Trott Scholarship was established at Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in memory of Reginald Fessenden and his wife.[55]
In 1928, as part of a lecture reviewing "The Early History of Radio in the United States", H. P. Davis, commenting on entertainment offerings, asserted that "Reginald Fessenden, probably the first to attempt this, broadcast a program Christmas Eve 1906",[33] but didn't provide any additional details, and his comment was little noticed at the time.