Reginald A. Fessenden House
Reginald A. Fessenden was born Quebec in 1866, and entered Bishop's University as a precocious young mathematical prodigy, but left in 1884 without graduating. In 1886, he took a position at the Edison Machine Works, working for inventor Thomas Edison. During an academic period teaching at Purdue University and at the University of Pittsburgh, Fessenden engaged in research on the nascent subject of wireless telegraphy. Much of the rest of his life he was employed in industry, either directly or as a consultant, but was often living near poverty, and produced a stream of inventions. In 1904 he invented the rotary spark-gap transmitter, and in 1906 he built a large transmitter in Massachusetts from which he successfully made a voice transmission. He also discovered the means to recombine separate frequencies to form a coherent audible sound. At his death he was described by inventor and businessman Elihu Thomson as "the greatest wireless inventor of the age, greater than Marconi."
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.