Reginald Aubrey Fessenden

• Born: October 6, 1866
• Birthplace: Milton, Quebec, Canada
• Died: July 22, 1932
• Place of death: Hamilton, Bermuda

Canadian electrical engineer

Fessenden developed the modern continuous carrier-wave radio, replacing radiotelegraphy with radiotelephony and making possible modern broadcast radio.

Primary field: Communications

Primary inventions: Broadcast radio; radiotelephony

Early Life

Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (FEHS-uhn-duhn) was the son of an Anglican priest living in Canada. At an early age, Fessenden showed a prodigious intellect, one that alienated many of his peers. Like many very bright children, he simply did not realize that those around him did not think as quickly or as easily as he did and thus inadvertently showed up others in ways that created resentment. He also had incredibly fine close vision, such that an ophthalmologist who examined him compared his eyes to a microscope. However, his sharp nearsightedness came at the price of very poor distance vision, and as a result he found it necessary to wear glasses from childhood.

Because of his unusually quick mind, Fessenden progressed through school so rapidly that he was ready to begin college-level work at age fourteen. While studying for his bachelor’s degree at Bishop’s College, he worked as a high school mathematics teacher in Quebec. After some time in this position, he went to Bermuda to set up his own school. Although he met his wife there, he found it difficult to attract paying students. The paucity of intellectual life was even more frustrating, and to entertain himself he set to reading Scientific American back issues and became self-taught in a number of fields of science and engineering.

In 1886, Fessenden headed to New York, hoping to find employment as a writer. At the time, he was thinking primarily in terms of his formal education in the classics and humanities. However, while he was able to pick up the occasional freelance assignment, he was unable to obtain regular employment, and as a family man he no longer had the freedom to take risks with his finances. He finally sought a job with Thomas Alva Edison, hoping that his knowledge of mathematics and science would be of use to the famous inventor. Although his initial contact went awry, he was soon hired by Edison’s chief machinist as a tester, responsible for locating and repairing breaks in New York City’s buried electrical lines.

Fessenden was so successful as a tester that Edison took note of him, asking him to become a chemist. Fessenden excelled in this position and was made Edison’s chief chemist. However, in 1890, Edison suffered a financial reverse, and Fessenden was laid off as a result.

Life’s Work

By this time, Fessenden’s technical skill had become sufficiently well known that he did not remain unemployed for long. George Westinghouse, who had made his fame and fortune with the air brake, had moved into electricity with Nikola Tesla’s polyphase alternating-current system and was looking for engineers. Fessenden made a key improvement in the double-stopper light bulb, enabling Westinghouse to avoid infringing upon Edison’s patents and to successfully electrify the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

Fessenden was dissatisfied with corporate life and decided to return to academia, this time as the head of Purdue University’s new electrical engineering department. Still restless, he tried an engineering professorship at the University of Western Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh, but it did not satisfy him either, so he decided to try his hand as a civil servant. The U.S. Weather Bureau (a predecessor of the National Weather Service) was establishing a chain of radio stations on the East Coast to transmit weather information, and in 1900 Fessenden was able to work out a very agreeable contract with the agency by which he would retain the rights to all patents derived from work he did for the department.

What should have been a plum arrangement soon soured, as Fessenden became convinced that the chief of the Weather Bureau intended to steal his patents. They quarreled and he quit after firing off a hasty letter of protest to President Theodore Roosevelt. However, in that brief period of time, he achieved the key insight that was to make his fame—namely, that it was possible to create a radio transmitter that would produce a continuous carrier wave, upon which could be imposed complex signals, even the human voice.

His abrupt separation from the Weather Bureau made it very difficult to realize his vision. He and his wife had little personal savings, and venture capital was not easily found. An arrangement with two Philadelphians quickly foundered on Fessenden’s inability to explain his concepts in terms understandable to someone not well versed in electrical theory. Hoping to generate some cash, he developed a new type of radio receiver that could easily be manufactured with off-the-shelf equipment, only to have it pirated by the U.S. Navy, which as a department of the federal government could not be sued, under the waiver of sovereign immunity.

When he did finally create his carrier wave-generating alternator, he failed to adequately publicize his first tests. As a result, his success in transmitting the human voice remained unknown to all but a few hobbyists and Navy radiomen. He had lost the opportunity to pique the public’s interest with the possibility of a technology that did not require a skilled code operator to understand.

As a result, Fessenden found it difficult to gain support from investors, and although he continued to work assiduously to improve his system, eventually the funds ran dry. He then moved on to other applications of radio theory, including an iceberg detector, which should have been welcome after the spectacular RMS Titanic disaster of 1912 but was adopted only with painful slowness, again because Fessenden had no idea how to build publicity. His radio direction finder, which he called a “pelorus,” would ultimately become the basis of the modern radio compass found in aircraft instrumentation, but very few people knew the tangled story of how it came to be.

During World War I, Fessenden developed an early form of long-wave radar sufficient to detect the Germans’ airship raids. He also developed the concept of carpet bombing, but the notion of manufacturing thousands of bombers and sending them aloft in mass formation was too far outside the box for the British military commanders to grasp.

After the war, Fessenden became increasingly interested in the similarities among the Flood stories of the Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Babylonians. He became convinced that they had a historic and scientific basis, and he eventually developed a theory that a sudden melt of glacial ice at the end of the last Ice Age resulted in a sudden innundation of the eastern Mediterranean basin and the Levant. He was also one of the first to suggest that the legendary city of Atlantis might actually lie within the Black Sea rather than the modern Atlantic Ocean, although he did not go so far as to connect it with Troy (of Homeric fame).

By the 1930’s, Fessenden had developed heart disease and had returned to Bermuda in the hopes of easing his worsening health. He died there in 1932. His tombstone reads, “I am yesterday and I know tomorrow”—written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Impact

Fessenden realized that radio waves could be made to carry the human voice. His invention eliminated the need for a trained code operator to transmit and receive wireless messages. With this technology, radio later became a medium for the masses. It remained only for David Sarnoff, himself a former code operator, to provide the business model, at Radio Corporation of America (RCA), that turned radio into an entertainment medium that would transform society.

Bibliography

Davis, L. J. Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution. New York: Arcade, 2003. A history of the early days of electricity, culminating in the invention of radio.

Fessenden, Helen M. Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows. New York: Coward-McCann, 1940. Detailed but biased biography written by his wife.

Israel, Paul. Edison: A Life of Invention. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998. One of the best recent biographies of Fessenden’s key employer.

Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House, 2003. Includes the story of the patent battle over the light bulbs for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, for which Fessenden provided a key solution.

Lewis, Tom. Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991. A history of the early days of radio. Helps place Fessenden in the larger context of the development of radio from wireless telegraphy to commercial broadcasting.

Prout, Henry G. A Life of George Westinghouse. New York: Arno Press, 1972. Includes information on the World’s Fair incident and Fessenden’s part in its resolution.