Canadian-born Reginald Fessenden was the first man in history to send wireless broadcasts of voice and music and was also the inventor of the sonic depth finder and various submarine signaling devices. In total he held over 500 patents Born in 1866, Fessenden spent much of his childhood in Ontario, where he excelled in mathematics and, at the age of 10, watched Alexander Graham Bell demonstrate the telephone. He closely studied Bell’s work and dreamed of transmitting the human voice without wires. During his brilliant academic career at Trinity College School in Ontario, financial problems forced the not quite 18-year-old to look for a job. Through his uncle Cortez he heard about a position as Headmaster of a small private school in Bermuda Bermuda a position he quickly accepted.
It was the Whitney Institute and apart from being Headmaster, Reginald Fessenden was also the only teacher!
On his first day in Bermuda, young Reginald met Helen May Trott, daughter of businessman/farmer Thaddeus Trott. For the first and only time in his life he fell in love. One Saturday, after helping the Trott family crate a huge order of tomatoes for shipment to New York, Mr. Trott asked Reginald point blank: “Have you made up your mind yet, young fellow, how you intend supporting my daughter?”
“I can’t, sir,” replied Reginald, “But I intend working with Mr. Edison in New York while I learn all I can about electricity. Edison pays a good wage, twenty or thirty dollars a month, enough to live on.” “Electricity?” replied Mr. Trott. “You mean there’s a future in that?” “Well, not exactly,” fumbled Reginald. “You see I must know a lot about electricity before I get anywhere at sending voice without wires. Then you could talk from Bermuda to New York and you would know the prices for onions, tomatoes and potatoes from hour to hour.”
It obviously took a lot of convincing for Mr. Trott to agree that such a hairbrained young man should marry his favourite daughter Helen. But finally it was decided that after barely two years in Bermuda, and not yet twenty years old, Reginald would go to New York and, armed with letters of introduction to all the important people Mr. Trott knew in New York, seek an interview with Mr. Edison.
After several frustrating weeks trying to get the interview with Mr. Edison, Reginald Fessenden was finally hired by the Thomas Edison Machine Works and furthered his research in wireless communication. Although few of his colleagues shared his view that broadcasting voices was possible, Reginald Fessenden was able to transmit radio’s first voice message from an island in the Potomac River, to a friend about a kilometer away. Radio broadcasting was born.
While the inventor of the wireless telegraph, Guglielmo Marconi, believed that sound waves were created by a spark causing a whiplash effect, Fessenden argued that sound waves continuously rippled outward, like water when a stone has been dropped into it. In 1906 he was finally able to demonstrate radio’s real potential. On Christmas Eve, he broadcast the first programme and Wireless operators on ships in the Atlantic heard him play “O Holy Night” on the violin and wish them a Merry Christmas.
During World War I, Reginald Fessenden invented a wireless system for submarine communication, devices to detect enemy artillery and locate enemy submarines, as well as the ‘fathometer’, an ocean depth device. Unfortunately Reginald Fessenden spent much of his time with legal suits, defending his own place in history as the inventor of radio broadcasting. In 1928, he was finally awarded $500,000 in his long-standing patent dispute.
That year, aged 62 and in failing health, Fessenden and his wife Helen returned to Bermuda where he died on July 22, 1932. He is buried at St. Marks Church in Devonshire. His grave is inscribed:
BY HIS GENIUS DISTANT LANDS CONVERSE AND MEN SAIL UNAFRAID UPON THE DEEP
Today the Fessenden-Trott Scholarships administered by the Bank of Bermuda HSBC remind us of Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden and his Bermudian wife, Helen May Trott.
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