USS Fessenden (DE-142)
She was named in honor of Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, born in Brome County, Quebec, Canada, 6 October 1866. He served as head chemist with Thomas Edison's East Orange, New Jersey, laboratories. In 1890 he began concentrating on electrical engineering, and through the next years made many important inventions and improvements in existing devices. His great contributions in the field of radio (particularly the invention of radio-telephony were of marked benefit not only to the Navy but to all seamen. He died 22 July 1932, at his home on Bermuda.
AM broadcasting
The person generally credited as the primary early developer of AM technology is Canadian-born inventor Reginald Fessenden. The original spark-gap radio transmitters were impractical for transmitting audio, since they produced discontinuous pulses known as "damped waves". Fessenden realized that what was needed was a new type of radio transmitter that produced steady "undamped" (better known as "continuous wave") signals, which could then be "modulated" to reflect the sounds being transmitted.