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Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, inventor (born on October 6, 1866, at Milton-Est in what is now Quebec; died on July 22, 1932, at Hamilton, Bermuda). Fessenden spent long hours reading in his father's library. His curiosity and inquiring mind remained with him all his life. He attended school in Port Hope, Ont. and Quebec and at age 19 moved to Bermuda to be the principal of a private school. In 1886 he moved to New York to find work with the great inventor Thomas Edison. Edison asked Fessenden to find a way to protect electrically charged wires. The young inventor soon solved the problem. An admirer said of him, "When he takes hold of an idea, his mind glimpses it as though looking through a thousand windows." When Edison went bankrupt, Fessenden found work with Westinghouse. He began to read more and more about sound waves. Since Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone, Fessenden had asked himself, "Why use wires?" In 1897 Marconi first transmitted Morse code through the air in England. On a holiday in Ontario, Fessenden made an important discovery. He tossed a stone in the water, and watched the ripples. He believed that radio signals could be sent out in waves that widened, like water ripples, until they could be picked up by an antenna. On December 23, 1900, Fessenden sat in a cabin on Cobb Island, near Washington, D.C. He shouted into a microphone, "One ... two ... three ... four. Is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen?" Over 1.5 km away, his assistant listened and wired back, "I hear you perfectly, sir. Your voice is loud and clear." It was the first time that speech had been transmitted without wires. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Fessenden showed his invention, which he called the wireless telephone, to the world. He made the first-ever public broadcast of speech and music that night. His audience were radio operators on board ships sailing along the Atlantic coast. They were startled and delighted to hear Fessenden playing "O Holy Night" on his fiddle and singing the words as well. Fessenden patented more than 500 inventions during his lifetime, including an amplified piano, a tracer bullet, and an electric gyroscope. During World War I, he developed an echo-sounding device to find German submarines. Fessenden gave away many of his inventions, and saw his greatest invention - radio - pass from company to company, with no benefit to him. He applied for a job at McGill University, but was passed over in favour of an American. He formed a company in Montreal, but the Canadian government snubbed him, and gave the rights for radio to Marconi. He made money from his deep-sea inventions, and in 1928 he received $2.5 million in a settlement with one of the radio companies. He retired to Bermuda. Among other awards, Fessenden received the Scientific American Medal for nearly 100 inventions that helped to make the oceans safer. Related Article: INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS; RADIO; TELEVISION.
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