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."
Alexander Van Rensselaer
Alexander Van Rensselaer, known as Alec or Alex, was born on October 1, 1850 to the Rev. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer (1808–1860) and his wife, Catherine Ledyard (1811–1882), sister of Henry Ledyard. He was born into a wealthy and influential Philadelphian family. His paternal grandparents were Stephen Van Rensselaer III (1764–1839) and Cornelia Bell Paterson, the daughter of William Paterson, the 2nd Governor of New Jersey, and later, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. His paternal uncles included Stephen Van Rensselaer IV (1789-1868) and Henry Bell Van Rensselaer (1810–1864). He graduated from Princeton University in 1871.