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
While growing up, Fessenden attended a number of educational institutions. At the age of nine, he was enrolled in the DeVeaux Military school for a year. He next attended Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, from 1877 until the summer of 1879. He also spent a year working for the Imperial Bank at Woodstock, because he had not yet reached the age of 16 needed to enroll in college. At the age of fourteen, Bishop's College School in Lennoxville, Quebec, which was a feeder school for Bishop's College and shared the same campus and buildings, granted him a mathematics mastership. Thus, while Fessenden was still a teenager, he taught mathematics to the younger students (some older than himself) at the School, while simultaneously studying with older students at the College. At the age of eighteen, Fessenden left Bishop's without having been awarded a degree, although he had "done substantially all the work necessary", in order to accept a position at the Whitney Institute in Bermuda, where for the next two years he worked as the principal and sole teacher. (This lack of a degree may have hurt Fessenden's employment opportunities. When McGill University in Montreal established an electrical engineering department, his application to become its chairman was turned down.) While in Bermuda, he became engaged to Helen Trott. They married in September 1890 and later had a son, Reginald Kennelly Fessenden.