Radio: A Christmas Gift to the World

The radio room at Brant Rock.

(Clark Collection/Smithsonian Institution)

As a Christmas Eve radio broadcast, it was pretty run-of-the-mill. A Handel Largo, a live violin rendition of “O Holy Night,” and a man announcing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will. Merry Christmas to all.” But then the man added, “Will those who have heard these words and music please write to R. A. Fessenden at Brant Rock, Massachusetts? We will speak to you again on New Year’s Eve.” Reginald Fessenden, the announcer, can be forgiven for his trite holiday program choice. He was making the first radio broadcast that ever went out to the public and included speech. It happened 101 years ago tonight, on December 24, 1906. He transmitted from Massachusetts and was heard as far away as Norfolk, Virginia.

He made the broadcast at a time when the rest of the world was still marveling over the dit-dahs of the Morse code Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless radio system transmitted. But, then, it was Fessenden’s lifelong blessing and curse to be ahead of his time. Born in 1866 in what is now Quebec, the precocious minister’s son was hired at 15 to teach math at the Bishop’s College School in Lennoxville in return for a free ride at the college. He left at 18 without a diploma, but by reading Scientific American and Nature in the school library he had already begun to teach himself the principles of physics and engineering he would later use to revolutionize radio.

He continued his self-education while employed by Thomas Edison, working his way up from helping lay electric light mains in 1885 to running Edison’s chemistry laboratory in 1889. He broke up his 11-hour workdays by reading physics textbooks during his lunch hour. During these midday study sessions he became interested in the science of electromagnetic waves. He continued his studies at the Newark public library when, after Edison was forced to close his lab in 1890, he went to work for a year as an electrician for Westinghouse. His first paid work on radio technology came in 1900, when the U.S. Weather Bureau lured him away from an electrical-engineering professorship at the Western University of Pennsylvania (later renamed the University of Pittsburgh) to develop a wireless network for communicating meteorological data. He quickly grew convinced that radio technology needed a complete overhaul.

Marconi’s system—indeed, all radio systems at the time—generated radio waves using a spark gap: They ionized a gas with a high voltage, creating a spark that emitted a pulse of radio-frequency energy. But Fessenden knew that spark-gap technology was a dead end. He was the first, and for several years the only, person to conceive that the transmission of speech might be possible. But to send speech over the airwaves would require an entirely new approach—using a continuous radio wave rather than the short, discrete bursts of energy created with the spark gap—and completely new technology. The equipment to create and receive continuous waves was not yet available, so Fessenden set out to invent it.

His three biggest hurdles would be generating a continuous wave, converting radio waves into audible sound that faithfully reproduced the original signal, and building a detector sensitive to the subtleties of speech. His first breakthrough came with the detector. Marconi’s system used a coherer, a glass tube filled with metal filings, to detect radio waves. When waves reached it, the filings clung together and completed a circuit, which then activated the telegraph buzzer. Fessenden found so many shortcomings with the coherer—it was either fully on or fully off, and thus not sensitive enough to respond to subtle variations in the signal, and the filings had to be manually tapped out of line before they could detect a new signal—that he developed his own, more sensitive detector, although his success came quite by accident.

His first attempt, a length of platinum wire mostly coated in silver, was no more sensitive than a coherer. But one day in March 1902, when he was etching the silver coating off a wire with nitric acid, he accidentally let the acid eat clean through the wire and found that the ends left in acid detected radio waves much better than a complete wire. After some refinements he patented what he called the “liquid barretter” that same year.

His next innovation underlies all radio technology to this day, but it hardly made a ripple at the time. He needed a way to turn sound waves into radio waves for transmission and then convert them back into sound at the receiving end. He named his solution the heterodyne (meaning “different power”) principle. Simply stated, he found that if he sent out two high-frequency waves, one bearing the music or voice he wanted to transmit and the other held at a constant frequency, they could mix to create a wave within the audible range that recreated the original signal.

But to do that he would need to create two continuous high-frequency radio waves, which no existing machinery could do. He decided to try to generate radio waves with an alternating-current generator, most often used for electric light and power. Contemporary alternators generated electromagnetic waves well below the frequencies he needed, so, true to form, he designed his own. It was built by General Electric and shipped to him in August 1906. Its top frequency, 76 kHz, was less than he had hoped, but it was still a triumph: It could generate a continuous radio wave. The final piece was in place.

Fessenden had of course continued experimenting in the interim. He had first transmitted voice through the ether in December 1900, when he sent a signal one mile between two 50-foot masts. “The character of the speech was not good,” he reported, “and it was accompanied by an extremely loud and disagreeable noise.” Nevertheless, he had proved that voice could be sent via radio, if only over short distances.

An accident several years later showed how much his subsequent inventions improved on the 1900 system, which he called “just a toy.” After quitting the Weather Bureau in the midst of a patent-rights squabble, he acquired the backing of two Pittsburgh businessmen. Under their aegis in January 1906 he built the first two-way wireless telegraph network across the Atlantic: radio towers 400 feet high in Brant Rock, Massachusetts, and Machrihanish, Scotland. In September, one of the operators in Scotland sent him a letter claiming to have heard through the radio equipment one of the American operators giving instructions to an employee. The Massachusetts station had accidentally broadcast a radio signal 3,000 miles across the ocean.

Fessenden kept that news quiet as he prepared for his Christmas Eve broadcast. He notified Navy and merchant ships in the North Atlantic to listen for the transmission. He originally expected that his wife or employees might take the microphone that evening, but, he later said, “on Christmas Eve I could not get any of the others to talk, sing, or play, and consequently had to do it myself.” When he signed off, he wasn’t sure anyone had heard him. But within days he began receiving postcards from sailors excited to have gotten actual voices through their headphones for the first time. A second broadcast on New Year’s Eve reached as far as the West Indies.

Fessenden would go on to create a turboelectric drive for ships, a system for underwater signaling, and an early television set, but the 1906 broadcasts were the high point of his radio career. His working life was characterized by short bursts of success between the static of legal feuds and personal animosity. He could be combative and irascible, and in 1910 he clashed with his Pittsburgh backers, who naively expected quick profits from an almost nonexistent industry. Their relationship ended in a legal battle for the company’s assets that would drag on for almost the rest of his life. In 1928 he finally won a $2.5 million settlement, four years before his death at 66 from heart failure.

Today, few non-engineers remember Fessenden’s name. But he, perhaps more even than the more-famous Marconi, was the father of modern radio. He could never understand why people didn’t flock to buy his inventions, when he had solved so many technical challenges. But his ideas were simply too far ahead of their time. It would be years before the state of the art caught up enough to turn his innovations into marketable products. In the meantime the public, satisfied with Marconi’s system, was perhaps not prepared to believe radio could accomplish even more. Fessenden alone saw its potential, and if posterity hasn’t rewarded his vision, his vision has certainly rewarded the generations of air and sea travelers, ambulance patients, cell phone users, music lovers, and everybody else finally ready to take advantage of it.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.