Fessenden Broadcasts: Radio's First Voice Rings Out

Wireless operators on ships scattered across the Atlantic Ocean heard something impossible on Christmas Eve 1906: a human voice emerging from equipment that had only ever produced Morse code dots and dashes. Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor broadcasting from a 420-foot antenna tower at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, played "O Holy Night" on his violin, read a passage from the Gospel of Luke, and wished listeners a Merry Christmas in what is generally regarded as the first AM radio broadcast in history. Fessenden had spent years developing an alternative to the spark-gap transmitters used by Guglielmo Marconi, which could only send the on-off pulses of Morse code. His breakthrough was the continuous wave transmitter, built by General Electric engineer Ernst Alexanderson, which generated a steady radio signal that could be modulated to carry the complex waveforms of voice and music. The technology was so far ahead of its time that most wireless operators who heard the broadcast were baffled by it, assuming their equipment was malfunctioning. The broadcast reached ships as far as several hundred miles offshore, though the exact range remains debated. Fessenden conducted a second demonstration on New Year Eve, and both transmissions were heard by United Fruit Company ships equipped with wireless receivers. Despite the technical triumph, Fessenden was unable to commercialize radio broadcasting. His financial backers at the National Electric Signaling Company cheated him out of his patents, triggering a legal battle that consumed decades of his life. Commercial radio broadcasting would not emerge until 1920, when Westinghouse station KDKA began regular programming from Pittsburgh. Fessenden died in 1932 with over 500 patents to his name but little public recognition. The technology he demonstrated at Brant Rock on that Christmas Eve became a trillion-dollar global industry.