The Father of Radio was born on October 6, 1866, in Quebec, Canada, the eldest of four boys. His parents hoped he would become a minister or teacher. To his mother, inventing was the road to ruin; her father invested in a string of failed inventions, leaving her family penniless when he died.
Fessenden was working directly for Edison at the inventor's new Llewellyn Park laboratory in Orange, New Jersey.
The very possibility of wireless communications at that time is founded on the research of James Clerk Maxwell, since his equations form the basis of computational electromagnetics. Their correctness was established by Heinrich Hertz, when in 1887 he discovered electromagnetic (EM) radiation at UHF frequencies as predicted by Maxwell.
In 1899, Reginald Fessenden demonstrated wireless transmission over 50 miles from Cobb Island, Maryland to Arlington, Virginia. The U.S. Weather Bureau liked what it saw, and hired him to develop a wireless weather information network.
The first AM transmission was made by Reginald Fessenden on 23 December 1900 using a spark gap transmitter with a specially designed high frequency 10 kHz interrupter, and the transmission took place on Cobb Island over a distance of one mile. Fessenden’s first words were "Hello, one, two, three, four. Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If it is, telegraph back and let me know."
It is the first amplitude modulated signal was transmitted by Reginald Fessenden. He took a continuous spark transmission and placed a carbon microphone in the antenna lead.
Amplitude modulation or AM is a form of modulation used for radio transmissions for broadcasting and two-way radio communication applications.
Pioneering work of amplitude modulation by Reginald Fessenden
