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Marshfield Public Schools |
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Daniel Webster School -
1456 Ocean Street - Marshfield, MA 02050 |
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Reginald Fessenden Click here to learn about Marshfield
Did you know that something truly
remarkable happened in Brant Rock, MA in 1906? This was something that had
never happened before in the whole world. Want a clue? Have you ever listened
to the radio? Reginald Fessenden was a famous inventor and chemist. He believed that he could send voices through the air without wires on radio waves. He set up a very tall tower in Brant Rock, in Machrihanish, Scotland, and in other places along the East coast of the United States. In 1906 he sent a voice message from Brant Rock to an assistant 50 miles away and IT WAS HEARD IN SCOTLAND! He made the first public radio broadcast of music and voice on Christmas Eve, 1906 [North Carolina Division of Archives and History] People listening were astounded! It was the first time they had ever heard such a thing! He had succeeded at his dream. This is an excerpt of what actually happened.
“When the cold and dark weather returned in the fall he resumed his
Trans-Atlantic Morse experiments and his local voice experiments, and in
November he rece Fessenden frantically checked the logs which recorded the various tests and satisfied himself that he'd actually invented equipment which could and did transmit voices across to Scotland. It had been a happy accident, but another accident now took place which stopped Fessenden cold. A storm wrecked his Scottish receiving tower on December 6, 1906. “
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a "personal" registered letter from his engineer, Armour, at Machrihanish which
both delighted and shocked him. The letter said, "at about 4 o'clock in the
morning I was listening in for telegraph signals from Brant Rock when to my
astonishment I heard instead of dots and dashes, the voice of Mr. Stein telling
the operators at Plymouth how to run the dynamo. At first I thought I must be
losing my senses, but I'm sure it was Stein's voice for it came in as clearly as
if he were in the next room."