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."
Francis Fessenden
He served in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands in 1866. He declined an appointment as the lieutenant colonel of the 45th U.S. Infantry in August 1866. Later that year, he was transferred to the 28th U.S. Infantry during the sweeping reorganization of the army. He retired from the Regular Army on November 1, 1866 with the rank of brigadier general. Fessenden then returned home to Portland and resumed his legal career. He was elected as the city's mayor in 1876. He was a Republican. He wrote a biography of his father, "The Life and Services of William Pitt Fessenden", which was published in 1907.