Reginald Fessenden

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 reported that, in late 1906, he 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 October 6, 1866, in East Bolton, Canada East, the eldest of the Reverend Elisha Joseph Fessenden and Clementina Trenholme's four children. Elisha Fessenden was a Church of England in Canada minister, and the family moved to a number of postings throughout the province of Ontario.

While growing up 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".)