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FESSENDON TOWER RESTORATION
October 2005 - In anticipation of the 100 year anniversary of the first wireless transmission,
an effort is being made to restore the original tower base in Blackman's Trailer Park. Also included will be a 1/10 scale replica
of the original tower with interpetive signage. This project has the support of the Blackman Family, the Brant Rock Village
Association and many generous private indivduals.
Pictured: Carl Russell volunteering his efforts
Photo by: Dave Riley
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| Postmark 1907 |
LOCAL NEWS
December 10, 2005
Remembering a forgotten
radio pioneer: Marshfield to mark anniversary of historic broadcast
By SHAMUS McGILLICUDDY
The Patriot Ledger
He is the forgotten pioneer. Yet anyone who has ever tuned a radio dial has experienced Reginald Aubrey Fessenden’s
legacy.
A Canadian-born scientist and inventor, Fessenden is said to be the first man to make a radio broadcast.
And he made that broadcast from Marshfield.
‘‘People first envisioned radio as a way of communicating, - point to point communications,’’ said
Edward Perry, owner of Marshfield radio station WATD. ‘‘What Fessenden did was he demonstrated that you could
entertain people with it.’’
‘‘He’s a forgotten hero,’’ said Dave Riley of Marshfield, a ham - or amateur - radio enthusiast.
‘‘He gave us most of what we have today (in radio).’’
Next month begins the 100th anniversary of one of the most important years in radio and communications history.
Fessenden’s legacy in Marshfield began in 1905 when he and his associates came to Brant Rock and built a 400-foot
radio tower in what is today the Blackman’s Point trailer park and campground. He arranged the construction of a second
tower in Macrihanish, Scotland.
The towers were completed within a few months, and on Jan. 2, 1906, Fessenden recorded his first historic moment. He made
the first two-way radio communication across the Atlantic Ocean by transmitting Morse code signals between Marshfield and
Scotland, and by the end of that year, used radio waves to broadcast music.
Now, 100 years later, people in Marshfield are preparing to celebrate the anniversary of Fessenden’s pioneering year
of radio in Marshfield.
Riley and several other locals have restored the masonry base of Fessenden’s radio tower, which was torn down in
1912.
They have a dedication planned at the tower’s base in Blackman’s Point at 1 p.m. on Saturday.
And on Jan. 2, Riley and hundreds of other ham radio operators across the world will transmit Morse code signals to each
other to mark the anniversary of the first two-way transatlantic communication. Specifically, he will send a message to radio
enthusiasts gathered in Macrihanish.
Others in town are talking about a summer celebration to mark the year. Perry and Robert Demers of the Marshfield Historical
Society said the town will form a committee to plan an event.
Until that two-way radio transmission on Jan. 2, the signals had been sent only one-way by Guglielmo Marconi.
Fessenden continued to experiment with radio throughout the year. In November, while sending Morse code signals to Scotland,
he accidentally transmitted his voice as well, becoming the first person to transmit voice across the Atlantic.
But late in 1906 a storm destroyed the tower in Scotland.
Riley said this dashed the hopes of Fessenden’s fledgling company, the National Electric Signaling Company, which
intended to sell his technology based on demonstrations of the two-way communication.
Then Fessenden decided to try something else.
U.S. Navy vessels and ships of the United Fruit Company had been equipped with radio equipment Fessenden had built. The
equipment had been used only for point-to-point Morse code communications.
The day before Christmas Eve 1906, Fessenden sent a message to those ships, telling them to listen for a message on Christmas
Eve.
They were surprised when they heard Fessenden’s voice.
‘‘All the shipboard operators were astonished when they heard this coming over their radio instead of the beep
beep beep (of Morse code),’’ Perry said.
Fessenden began his legendary broadcast with a brief introduction about what he planned to do. Then he played a phonograph
record of George Frideric Handel’s ‘‘Largo.’’ He followed that with his own violin solo, playing
‘‘O Holy Night.’’
He read some passages from the Bible, wished his listeners a merry Christmas and signed off for the evening.
Ships reported hearing him up and down the Atlantic coast, as far south as the Caribbean.
Perry said Fessenden’s broadcast was historic.
‘‘We think it was Fessenden that laid the groundwork for radio to become a broadcast medium rather than point-to-point
communication. We see him as the founder of entertainment radio communications.’’
Perry said it took another 15 years for the radio entertainment industry to get going with the country’s first commercial
radio station, KDK in Pittsburgh.
‘‘But Fessenden was at the beginning of this thing,’’ Perry said.
Unfortunately, Fessenden’s Pittsburgh-based investors were not interested in transmitting voices and music.
As the radio entertainment industry exploded in the 1920s, Fessenden’s legacy was forgotten.
It wasn’t until 1928 that he won $500,000 in a lawsuit over some of the patents he had lost to his investors.
Riley said he wants to mark the centennial because he hopes Fessenden’s inventiveness will inspire other aspiring
technological pioneers in the area. He also wants Fessenden to get the credit he is due. Many historians remember Marconi
has the father of radio.
‘‘He never really got the credit I think he deserves,’’ Demers agreed.
Shamus McGillicuddy may be reached at smcgillicuddy@ledger.com.
Radio days at Brant Rock
100 years ago, a Marshfield station created a buzz that's still in the air
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff | January 1, 2006
A lonely transmission pole rises from the roof of a modest building nestled among trailer homes in Brant Rock, bleating
out the forgotten pulse of radio history -- long, short, short, short; long, long, long -- or ''B.O." in
Morse code.
The radio beacon, the call letters of a radio station that once broadcast from this corner of Marshfield a century ago,
is a radio wave monument to an inventor who pioneered a year of radio ''firsts" in Brant Rock in 1906. Reginald A. Fessenden,
a Canadian-born engineer and inventor who came to Marshfield to work at the radio station, was then
forgotten by history, even as his legacy spread into homes, cars, and ships across the world.
Tomorrow, radio hams worldwide will kick off the centennial of Fessenden's big year in radio, when they will meet on the
airwaves, establishing contact with the revived Brant Rock station, and exchange postcards with a special cancellation mark
from the seaside neighborhood that pushed radio forward so long ago.
''The whole idea . . . is to seize the year -- carpe annum," said Edward Perry, head of WATD, a commercial radio station
in Marshfield, and a Fessenden admirer. ''What we have here is, this 2006, we have a centennial that is really important to
the industry, marks the first time people actually saw a demonstration of radio as an entertainment medium instead of just
a replacement of a telegraph wire."
The breakthroughs began on Jan. 2, 1906, when the Brant Rock station, owned by the National Electric Signaling
Co., began sending wireless Morse code communications to its sister tower in Machrihanish, Scotland. Eight
days later, the 420-foot-high radio tower that once swayed high above Brant Rock picked up the first transatlantic reply:
''Condensers working very satisfactorily" buzzed over the airwaves from Scotland, according to a book by Fessenden's wife,
Helen.
''To another generation . . . all this may seem very tame, but then it was HISTORY -- news from the mould of Time," she
wrote in ''Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows."
Other successes followed quickly. By fall that year, the Scottish station heard voices for the first time,
when the station overheard a conversation between radio operators in Brant Rock and Plymouth. On Christmas Eve the same year,
Fessenden broadcast the first radio program. US Navy ships, as well as United Fruit Co. ships from Norfolk, Va., to the West
Indies, heard Fessenden give a short speech followed by Handel's ''Largo" played on a phonograph. Fessenden
then played and sang ''O, Holy Night" -- ''though the singing of course was not very good," according to an excerpt from Fessenden's
papers quoted in the book.
That broadcast broke the mold: ''Suddenly, what Fessenden saw was, you can use radio to transmit not only voice, but to
entertain people," Perry said. ''It wasn't to communicate as you might with a telephone or a telegraph; it was entertainment.
. . . It was stupendous."
Even so, most people today associate radio with Guglielmo Marconi rather than Fessenden. While Marconi
was the first to send transatlantic wireless messages one way and was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics, Fessenden has
been largely forgotten, even though his work represented a significant step toward modern-day radio.
''The technology used by Marconi bears no resemblance to the technology used today," John S. Belrose, an emeritus radio
scientist researcher at the Communications Research Centre in Canada, wrote in an e-mail.
To transmit messages, Marconi used a ''spark gap transmitter," a technology that created short pulses
of radio waves that could not easily carry voice. Fessenden developed a way to use continuous radio waves that could carry
not just messages in code, but also voices and music -- a precursor to AM radio.
Fessenden's work, Belrose argues, were pioneering steps toward modern-day radio. ''Fessenden, a genius and a mathematician,
was the inventor of radio as we know it today," he wrote in a piece presented to the International Conference on 100 Years
of Radio in 1995.
Today, the remnants of the original radio signal tower -- bare slabs of reinforced concrete, conical porcelain insulators
sandwiched in between, and a huge bell-shaped pivot point on top -- are nestled behind homes in Blackman's Point trailer park,
far from view. The transmitter and pole sending out the modern-day ''B.O." beacon sit nearby.
Every once in a while, a fanatical visitor will come to Brant Rock in search of the tower to pay homage to Fessenden, said
Maureen Blackman, whose husband's family has long owned the land on which the monument sits. But the Fessenden name and his
accomplishments are known mostly just to the radio hams who fondly refer to him as ''Reggie" or ''Fesse."
''I call him Reggie because we're soul mates -- I love this guy," said Dave ''Sparks" Riley, a ham-radio fanatic from Marshfield
who has worked to revive Fessenden's story and raise appreciation for the man's contributions, not only as a radio man but
also as an inventor and entrepreneur.
This summer, the town will attempt to save this hero of radio from obscurity, with plans for a radio-themed festival, a
42-foot-tall scale replica of the original tower that was torn down in 1917, and an annual reprisal of the
original Christmas Eve broadcast.
Perry is also looking forward to settling an issue that has long been contentious among radio historians -- proving that
Fessenden really was the first radio broadcaster, rather than Nathan Stubblefield, a Kentucky farmer who reportedly invented
and demonstrated a wireless telephone in 1902. ''We contend he never broadcast on the radio," Perry said.
The ''B.O." signal has been broadcasting for months now, and it has already been copied in Los Angeles and Germany. And
Carl Russell, master of the Daniel Webster Masonic Lodge, led efforts to refurbish the stonework around the
remnants of the old tower, largely neglected since World War I.
Across the Atlantic, Duncan McArthur, a Scottish radio ham, said that Machrihanish will reactivate its station this month
and dedicate a small memorial on the site next summer. The town is also considering a commemorative event for next winter,
he said.
''Seems a shame he is not remembered more, as he was way ahead of Marconi," McArthur wrote in a telegraph-like e-mail.
''Fessenden not known about at all here. But will change this."
For more information on2006 events andFessenden's history, visit www.radiocom.net/Fessenden. Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. 
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