© Mark Ollig
Reginald Fessenden, born in East Bolton, Quebec, was nearly ten years old during the summer of 1876 when he witnessed inventor Alexander Graham Bell give a public demonstration of his new telephone device in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.
Bell impressed the people watching by demonstrating how a person’s voice could be electrically transmitted “long distance” through a telegraph wire from Brantford to a Paris, Ontario, telegraph receiving station some 9.5 miles away.
Citizens in the Brantford telegraph station spoke and even sang and played music into the telephone.
Their audio was transmitted over the telegraph wire.
Bell’s assistant at the telephone receiving end in Paris was listening and replied, saying he heard everything from the folks in Brantford.
Bell proved his invention could be used for voice communication between towns miles apart connected by telegraph wires.
Witnessing Bell’s demonstration inspired the young Reginald Fessenden to dream of the day when the human voice would communicate over long distances without wires.
Years later, Reginald Fessenden was employed with the Edison Machine Works in New York.
He also taught electrical engineering at two universities while continuing his research in wireless communication.
Fessenden’s research led him to experiments with amplitude modulation technology and the development of wireless sound transmission.
He designed and engineered how an audio sound wave could modulate its amplitude with an electrical signal and be oscillated and transmitted as a constant radio frequency.
On Dec. 23, 1900, from his telegraph radio station in Cobb Island, MA, Fessenden, speaking into a microphone, voiced a message wirelessly transmitted through the air to a telegraph radio station one mile away.
“One, two, three, four. Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If it is, telegraph back and let me know.”
Fessenden’s words were electrically transmitted through the air as a radio signal.
Mr. Thiessen, listening with earphones at the telegraph station, could perfectly hear and understand the words Fessenden said.
Reginald Fessenden had successfully demonstrated “radiotelephony” (wireless speech transmission).
I learned Fessenden used power from steam engines to generate the electricity needed for transmitting the audio radio message.
Fessenden later told the story of how Dec. 24, 1906, he accomplished wireless voice communication to radiotelegraph operators stationed aboard ships in the Atlantic Ocean.
From inside his “radio shack” in Brant Rock, MA, Fessenden, using a telegraph, keyed Morse Code “CQ-CQ-CQ” dots and dashes, transmitting the message for getting the attention of any telegraph operators within range.
Inside a ship’s radio room on the Atlantic Ocean, a telegraph operator hears Fessenden’s CQ calls and acknowledges them by keying a coded message through a radio wave spark-gap transmitter.
As the ship’s telegraph operator listened, Fessenden spoke into a microphone wired to an amplifier connected to a 420-foot tall radio tower from where radio signals “carrying” his audio message were transmitted.
I can only imagine the telegraph operator’s reaction when he heard a human voice in his earphones.
Fessenden gave a brief speech and then introduced a special Christmas concert for all those listening.
He turned on an Edison phonograph with a recording cylinder that played a holiday song for two minutes into the microphone.
Fessenden then reached for his violin and played the song “O, Holy Night.”
He ended the radio broadcast by wishing everyone a “Merry Christmas.”
The radio operators on ships up and down the Atlantic seaboard and in wireless land-based telegraph stations miles away in Virginia who heard Fessenden’s Christmas concert broadcast were reportedly astonished.
I found a Nov. 7, 1907 article from the Connecticut Waterbury Democrat titled “Telephoning Without Wire.”
It referenced Reginald Fessenden’s “. . . telephoning without the aid of wires. His latest and most successful test has been to carry on a conversation over a distance of 10 miles.”
On May 10, 1910, the Minneapolis Wireless Association was founded by a group of local amateur radio hobbyists to generate public interest in using wireless radio communications as a broadcast medium.
A Minneapolis Journal article from May 12, 1910, reported a meeting where George W. Almour, the chief wireless operator on the battleship Connecticut, addressed the Minneapolis Wireless Association.
Almour discussed building and operating a “wireless station” in Minneapolis, connecting local business establishments with radio communications.
In March 1920, the University of Minnesota obtained an experimental license for a radio transmitter and operated a radio station on campus using call letters 9X1.
On Jan. 13, 1922, the University of Minnesota radio station 9X1 was granted a full license to operate under the call sign WLB.
St. Olaf College (WCAL) in Northfield, MN, and Dunwoody Industrial Institute (WCAS) in Minneapolis also began broadcasting over its student-operated radio stations.
During the early 1920s, radio listeners were using crystal sets.
These crystal radio receivers contained a piece of galena crystal, a natural semiconductor, and a thin wire or “cat’s whisker” detector used with a tuning coil that filtered out a radio frequency signal (broadcast) a listener wanted to hear.
The crystal-set radio itself requires no power. Instead, its antenna wire receives an oscillating radio wave electrically transmitted by the radio station’s tower, which provides power to the crystal set’s earphone for hearing a radio broadcast.
A crystal-set radio uses high-impedance earphones so the listener can hear the audio produced by the sound wave vibrations. Sometimes, a radio broadcast from miles away could be listened to.
Radio’s “Roaring Twenties” had begun.
Be sure to read next week’s column, “Radio continues to ‘Roar.’”
 |
| Fessenden's 420-foot tall radio tower |
 |
| Reginald Fessenden stands the tallest in the middle with his colleagues |
