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."
Reginald Fessenden
Fessenden contracted with General Electric (GE) to help design and produce a series of high-frequency alternator-transmitters. In 1903, Charles Proteus Steinmetz of GE delivered a 10 kHz version which proved of limited use and could not be directly used as a radio transmitter. Fessenden's request for a faster, more powerful unit was assigned to Ernst F. W. Alexanderson, who in August 1906 delivered an improved model which operated at a transmitting frequency of approximately 50 kHz, although with far less power than Fessenden's rotary-spark transmitters.