Reginald A. Fessenden Centennial Celebration and Awards Dinner

On December 24, 1906, Canadian inventor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden made what many believe to be the first intentional broadcast in amplitude modulation. Fessenden had invented AM a few years previously, while working on radio technology for the U.S. Weather Bureau in Maryland; after his relationship with the Weather Bureau soured, he left to join NESCO, the National Electric Signaling Company, where he continued to develop radio technology until 1911. Throughout this time, Fessenden seems to have conceptualized AM radio as a “wireless telephone” rather than a fundamentally new, broadcast medium. This leads some people to dispute the claim that his was the first broadcast (and there are other nearly-contemporaneous contenders).

What is undisputed, however, is that Reginald Fessenden did play his violin and read from the Bible in front of a microphone on Christmas Eve, 1906, and again on New Year's Eve, and that these transmissions were heard aboard ships several hundred miles out in the Atlantic. For most people, this is enough to make it an intentional broadcast, and thus secure Fessenden's place in history.

The investors in NESCO had expected to eventually sell the company to the Bell System; when this did not pan out, they fired Fessenden, and ultimately sold the company—including the rights to several important Fessenden patents—to Westinghouse. Those patents would become part of the pool around which was formed the Radio Corporation of America.

Fessenden's original transmitter facility was located in Brant Rock, Marshfield, Mass. Although transmissions ceased and the tower was dismantled not long after Fessenden left NESCO, the base of the tower and a few buildings believed to be Fessenden's workshops and power house still remain, in what is now an RV park.

It took Marshfield seventy years to get another local broadcaster, and this time it was Edwin Howard Armstrong's frequency modulation, rather than Fessenden's amplitude modulation: WATD-FM (95.9), which was started and is still owned by Edward F. Perry, Jr. WATD is one of the most respected small-market stations in the country for its local community involvement and news presence, in a part of the Greater Boston area which has no other local broadcast media—the nearest potential competitors (in Quincy, Brockton, and Plymouth) are all more than 15 miles away.

Ed Perry has long taken an interest in Marshfield's place in broadcasting history; in 1991 he helped to organize a celebration of the 85th anniversary of Fessenden's broadcast. As the 100th anniversary approached, once again it was Ed who provided the inspiration and media support for the celebration. (Tivoli Audio also sponsored the event.) On August 5, WATD organized a live broadcast from the Daniel Webster Estate in Marshfield with a number of old-timers and several of Ed's friends in the radio business for an afternoon-long celebration of Fessenden's legacy and the radio business, culminating in a dramatic reenactment of the original broadcast. That evening, people from Marshfield joined the broadcasting community in celebrating the career of WBZ's Gary LaPierre, who retires this December. LaPierre received the first (annual?) Reginald A. Fessenden award in recognition of his forty years of service as morning news anchor on WBZ.