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Artist's conception of Fessenden by the renowned graphic illustrator John Barrett, with the text written by naval author and historian Robert F. Sumrall. Their company, Navy Yard Associates, offers prints of most destroyers, submarines and aircraft carriers in various configurations during the ship's lifetime. ALL the destroyer escorts ARE available in their WWII configuration. The prints can be customized with ship's patches, your photograph, your bio, etc. When you purchase artwork from them, please indicate that you heard about their work from NavSource. |
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Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (6 October 1866 - 22 July 1932) was born in Milton, Province of Quebec, Canada. At the age of fourteen, Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec granted Fessenden a mathematics mastership. In late 1886, Fessenden began working directly for Thomas Edison at the inventor's new Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. Fessenden quickly made major advances, especially in receiver design, as he worked to develop audio reception of signals. From 1890 to 1900, Fessenden worked at several manufacturing companies and became a professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University in 1892 and then chair of the electrical engineering department of the University of Pittsburgh in 1893. By 1900, Fessenden was working for the United States Weather Bureau where he evolved the heterodyne principle where two signals combined produce a third audible tone. While there, Fessenden, experimenting with a high-frequency spark transmitter, successfully transmitted speech on 23 December 1900 over a distance of about 1.6 kilometers (one mile), which appears to have been the first audio radio transmission.
On 21 December 1906, Fessenden made an extensive demonstration of the new alternator-transmitter at Brant Rock, showing its utility for point-to-point wireless telephony, including interconnecting his stations to the wire telephone network. A few days later, two additional demonstrations took place, which appear to be the first audio radio broadcasts of entertainment and music ever made to a general audience. On the evening of 24 December 1906 (Christmas Eve), Fessenden used the alternator-transmitter to send out a short program from Brant Rock, which included his playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage, Luke Chapter 2, from the Bible. On 31 December, New Year's Eve, a second short program was broadcast. The main audience for both these transmissions was an unknown number of shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast. Although now seen as a landmark, these two broadcasts were barely noticed at the time and soon forgotten. His great contributions in the field of radio 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 was the first ship named in his honor. |
William F. Fessenden |
