Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (October 6, 1866 – July 22, 1932) was a Canadian-American electrical engineer and inventor who received hundreds of patents in fields related to radio and sonar between 1891 and 1936 (seven of them after his death).
Fessenden pioneered developments in radio technology, including the foundations of amplitude modulation (AM) radio. His achievements included the first transmission of speech by radio (1900), and the first two-way radiotelegraphic communication across the Atlantic Ocean (1906). In 1932 he claimed that, in late 1906, he had also made the first radio broadcast of entertainment and music, although that claim has not been well documented.
He did a majority of his work in the United States and, in addition to his Canadian citizenship, claimed U.S. citizenship through his American-born father.
Reginald Fessenden was born on October 6, 1866, in East Bolton, Canada East, the eldest of four children of the Reverend Elisha Joseph Fessenden and Clementina Trenholme. Elisha Fessenden was a Church of England in Canada minister, and the family moved to a number of postings throughout the province of Ontario.
Fessenden attended a number of educational institutions. At the young 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, he returned to his hometown in the Eastern Townships and went to the nearby Bishop's College School, which granted him a mathematics mastership (teaching job) and a scholarship for studying in its college division at University of Bishop's College. Thus, while Fessenden was still a teenager, he taught mathematics to the school's younger students (some older than himself) for four years, while simultaneously studying natural sciences 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, near to Flatts Village in Bermuda, where for the next two years he worked as the headmaster 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 May Trott of Smith's Parish. They married on September 21, 1890, in the United States at Manhattan in New York City, and later had a son, Reginald Kennelly Fessenden, born May 7, 1893, in Lafayette, Allen, Indiana.
Fessenden's classical education provided him with only a limited amount of scientific and technical training. Interested in increasing his skills in the electrical field, he moved to New York City in 1886, with hopes of gaining employment with the famous inventor, Thomas Edison. However, his initial attempts were rebuffed; in his first application Fessenden wrote, "Do not know anything about electricity, but can learn pretty quick," to which Edison replied, "Have enough men now who do not know about electricity." However, Fessenden persevered, and before the end of the year was hired for a semi-skilled position as an assistant tester for the Edison Machine Works, which was laying underground electrical mains in New York City. He quickly proved his worth, and received a series of promotions, with increasing responsibility for the project. In late 1886, Fessenden began working directly for Edison at the inventor's new laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, as a junior technician. He participated in a broad range of projects, which included work in solving problems in chemistry, metallurgy, and electricity. However, in 1890, facing financial problems, Edison was forced to lay off most of the laboratory employees, including Fessenden. (Fessenden remained an admirer of Edison his entire life, and in 1925 stated that "there is only one figure in history which stands in the same rank as him as an inventor, i. e. Archimedes".)
Taking advantage of his recent practical experience, Fessenden was able to find positions with a series of manufacturing companies. In 1892, he received an appointment as professor for the newly formed Electrical Engineering department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana; while there, he helped the Westinghouse Corporation install the lighting for the 1893 Chicago World Columbian Exposition. Later that year, George Westinghouse personally recruited Fessenden for the newly created position of chair of the Electrical Engineering department at the Western University of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh (now the University of Pittsburgh).
In the late 1890s, reports began to appear about the success Guglielmo Marconi was having in developing a practical system of transmitting and receiving radio signals, then commonly known as "wireless telegraphy". Fessenden began limited radio experimentation, and soon came to the conclusion that he could develop a far more efficient system than the spark-gap transmitter and coherer-receiver combination which had been created by Oliver Lodge and Marconi. By 1899 he was able to send radiotelegraph messages between Pittsburgh and Allegheny City (now an area of Pittsburgh), using a receiver of his own design.
In 1900 Fessenden left Pittsburgh to work for the United States Weather Bureau, with the objective of demonstrating the practicality of using coastal stations to transmit weather information, thereby avoiding the expense of the existing telegraph lines. The contract called for him to be paid $3,000 per year and provided with work space, assistance, and housing. Fessenden would retain ownership of any inventions, but the agreement also gave the Weather Bureau royalty-free use of any discoveries made during the term of the contract. Fessenden quickly made major advances, especially in receiver design, as he worked to develop audio reception of signals. His initial success came from the invention of a barretter detector. This was followed by an electrolytic detector, consisting of a fine wire dipped in nitric acid, which for the next few years set the standard for sensitivity in radio reception.
As his work progressed, Fessenden also developed the heterodyne principle, which used two closely spaced radio signals to produce an audible tone that made Morse code transmissions much easier to hear. However, heterodyne reception would not become practical for a decade after it was invented, because it required a method for producing a stable local signal, which would not become available until the development of the oscillating vacuum-tube.
Fessenden's initial Weather Bureau work took place at Cobb Island, Maryland, located in the Potomac River about 80 kilometers (50 mi) downstream from Washington, D.C. 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.
National Electric Signaling Company
In November 1902, two wealthy Pittsburgh businessmen, Hay Walker Jr. and Thomas H. Given, financed the formation of the National Electric Signaling Company (NESCO) to support Fessenden's research. Initially the new company was based in Washington, D.C., where a station was constructed for experimental and demonstration purposes. Two additional demonstration stations were constructed at Collingswood, New Jersey (near Philadelphia) and Jersey City, New Jersey (near New York City). In 1904 an attempt was made to link the General Electric plants in Schenectady, New York, and Lynn, Massachusetts, a distance of 185 miles (298 km); however, the effort was unsuccessful.