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Reginald Aubrey FESSENDEN
1906 - Reginald Fessenden - First AM Radio Broadcast

Fessenden reported that on the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), he had made the first of two radio broadcasts of music and entertainment to a general audience, using the alternator-transmitter at Brant Rock (Marshfield).


TELEPHONING WITHOUT WIRE
Another Miracle is Almost Ready for Commercial Use
(From the Denver News)

Hard upon the heels of wireless telegraphy comes the news that telephoning without the aid of wires is within sight. Reginald Fessenden has been conducting experiments in this line since 1898, and his latest and most successful test has been to carry on a conversation without wires over a distance of 10 miles. Plainly, if this can be done for 10 miles greater distances will require nothing more than greater perfection in the instruments used, and another thing that our grandmothers would have regarded as a miracle is almost ready to be stocked and bonded. Some of the difficulties in the way of this achievement may be appreciated from a brief statement of the machinery necessary to get thus far on the solution of the problem. To telephone without wire it was not enough to send successive shocks through the air, as in telegraphy. Other shocks, or better, impulses, must also be communicated to give the tones of the words the human voice and record actual words. For this it was estimated that a dynamo was required which should alternate, that is, change the direction of its current, 50,000 times per second. It is idle to ask anyone to think of this, for no human being ever yet got a clear mental picture of anything approaching such rapidity. But the machine has been built, and its "rotating field" revolves at the rate of about five miles per minute - another unthinkable, at least not clearly thinkable, performance. Add to these experiments of Mr. Fessenden on the receivers, and the way to over-come atmospheric disturbances, and you will wonder that he has accomplished so much in nine short years. If he completes what he has so well started he will be worthy to rank among the foremost inventors of the age. And the News has not very much doubt that he will do it.

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
November 4, 1907





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