Reginald FessendenDied 22 Jul 1932 at age 65 (born 6 Oct 1866). Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was a Canadian-American physicist, engineer and inventor with 300 patents. He broadcast the first program of voice and music. In 1893, Fessenden moved to Pittsburgh as the head of electrical engineering at the university, Fessenden read of Marconi's work and began experimenting himself. Marconi could only transmit Morse code. But Fessenden's goal was to transmit the human voice and music. He invented the “continuous wave” AM radio: sound superimposed by amplitude modulation onto a carrier radio wave for transmission. A radio receiver extracts the signal from the carrier wave so the listener hears the original sound. Fessenden made the first long-range transmissions of voice on Christmas Eve 1906 from a station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, heard hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic. |
