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.
Russell Henry Chittenden
He was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1856, graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1875, studied in Heidelberg in 1878-79, and received his doctorate at Yale in physiological chemistry in 1880. He was of English ancestry, his first ancestor in America being Major William Chittenden, an officer in the English army, who, having resigned, came to America from Cranbrook, Kent, with his wife, Joanne Sheaffe, in 1639, and settled in Guilford Connecticut. Ancestors of the professor on both his father's and his mother's side fought in the Revolutionary War.
He was professor of physiological chemistry at Yale from 1882 to 1922. He was director of the Sheffield Scientific School from 1898-1922. He was also professor of physiology at the Yale School of Medicine starting in 1900. From 1898 to 1903 he was also a lecturer on physiological chemistry at Columbia University, New York. He was a founding member of the American Physiological Society in 1887 and served as its president from 1895 to 1904. He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.