How long did Reginald Aubrey Fessenden live?
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Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (October 6, 1866 – July 22, 1932) was a Canadian-born inventor, who did a majority of his work in the United States and also claimed U.S. citizenship through his American-born father. During his life he received hundreds of patents in various fields, most notably ones related to radio and sonar.
Reginald Fessenden
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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 A. Fessenden House
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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.
USS Fessenden (DE-142)
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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.
Cobb Island (Maryland)
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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.
Broadcasting in the United States
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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."
Reginald A. Fessenden House
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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".) 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.
Reginald Fessenden
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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.
Reginald Fessenden
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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.
Machrihanish
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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. 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. 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. They married in September 1890 and later had a son, Reginald Kennelly Fessenden.
Reginald Fessenden