Radio Turns 100 this weekend.

[davideduardo]

This is from Wikipedia, which means it is public domain...

"On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden's work was the first real departure from Marconi's damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA."

Of course, this makes me feel like a near-pioneer as I have been in the field for 48 of those 100 years.

 

[Tom Wells]

I will relate another Fessenden story. In advanced age, he moved to Bermuda for health reasons.
He has a churlish person, little given to idle chat. He still maintained a radio installation at his home.
A very-young ham operator in the US contacted his station on 'phone (AM) somehow, eager for a Bermuda contact.
It was being operated by another person, who at the boy's request, sent for Mr Fessenden himself to come to the radio.
At first Mr. F was happy to have been contacted ( this being somewhere in the 30's), but upon finding himself speaking to a boy,
he lost it and thundered, "I am not a radio amatuer! I am a Scientist! GOOD DAY!"

Fessenden's method was to ignite a carbon-arc discharge circuit, and audio modulate the arc current.
The arc discharge created massive wideband RF, and when directed through a tuning circuit, was probably very effective.
The high-frequency capability for this this method exceeded what we come to know as AM with a generated carrier.
And the receiving gear at the time had no selectivity to speak of, that is to say, it was wideband hi-fi capable, cicuit-wise.
It probably sounded about like FM, except for the 2000-ohm metal-diaphragm headsets of 1906.
But I am sure the Christmas eve broadcast stunned many wireless operators with its fidelity.
And I have also read there were complaints about his "broadcast" in commercial frequencies.