Vol. 45 No. 16 • Our 45th Season!
August 20 - 26, 2015
Page 19
TORY BURCH, ALEX AND ANI, HUNTER, STUART WEITZMAN from page 11
until World War I, negotiated with Serbian American inventor Nikola Tesla to establish wireless service on the Nantucket Lightship. The two sides negotiated into 1900 with neither party able to reach an agreement. The Light House Board even offered Tesla the contract, but he never signed it. Fessenden, a Canadian inventor who had worked for Thomas Edison and was head of the electrical engineering department at Western Pennsylvania University, was hired by the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1900. The bureau asked him to create a network of stations which could transmit weather information using radio technology instead of telegraphed cables. Fessenden had been hearing reports of Marconi’s system for a number of years and believed he could create a better version which had a longer range and transmitted the human voice. Funded by the US government, he quickly made improvements in the technology and in December of 1900 Fessenden successfully broadcast a spoken word for the first time. Fessenden and the US Weather Bureau parted company in 1902 over a dispute over ownership of his patents. Eventually Fessenden received backing from General Electric, and, on Christmas Eve in 1906, he broadcast from Brant Rock, Massachusetts what is believed to be the first radio broadcast meant to entertain listeners. It included music and Bible selections. That same year the New York Herald sold its Sconset wireless station to the Marconi Company. The Nantucket site would be one of the company’s most important stations. It expanded and installed a larger wireless version in 1904. A fire destroyed the station in 1907, Marconi rebuilt and would operate it until World War I. In 1909, a young David Sarnoff, the Belarusian American pioneer of American radio and television, lived in ‘Sconset and trained as a Marconi radio operator. Sarnoff rose from office boy to commercial manager and later to president of RCA. While at the Marconi Company, Sarnoff saw that radio technology had the potential to broadcast to masses of people, not just from one point to another and eventually was able to test his idea in 1921. More than 300,000 people listened to a boxing match, and large scale broadcast continued on page 20
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Radio Technology
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Yesterday’s Island/Today’s Nantucket