Broadcast Radio Turns 100

GraWil writes "On Christmas eve 1906, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden's work was the first real departure from Marconi's damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA."

Comments

Re:The Wireless

[Nate B.]

Isn't it interesting that when people started experimenting with networking computers over radio that they rejuvenated "wireless" to describe networking without wires? Just as in the early days wireless was used to describe telegraphy without wires. What was old is new again.

Did anyone else discover that any song that had "radio" in its title (Queen's Radio Ga-Ga) or discussed radio (Rush's Spirit of Radio) to be an instant personal favorite?