In the spark era, wireless meant dots and dashes. A spark transmitter crashed out bursts of noise, a coherer tapped back Morse code, and that was supposed to be enough. Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor who had worked for Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, thought it was only the beginning. If a radio wave could be made steady, like a pure musical tone, instead of dying away in sparks, then a human voice might ride on it.
Fessenden got his chance while working for the United States Weather Bureau on Cobb Island, in the Potomac River in Maryland. On December 23, 1900, between two masts about fifty feet tall and roughly a mile apart, he put a carbon microphone directly in the antenna lead of a high-frequency spark transmitter and spoke. One, two, three, four. Is it snowing where you are, Mr. Thiessen? If so, telegraph back and let me know. His assistant Thiessen heard the words, buried in a disagreeable roar of spark noise but plainly intelligible, and telegraphed back that it was, indeed, snowing. It was the first successful transmission of speech by radio.
One scratchy mile was a proof, not a product. Fessenden spent the next six years chasing the smooth continuous wave he knew voice would need. Along the way he devised his sensitive barretter and electrolytic detectors and described the heterodyne principle, mixing two signals to produce an audible beat note, an idea still at work every time a modern ham switches on a beat-frequency oscillator to copy CW. At Brant Rock, Massachusetts, his National Electric Signaling Company raised a tubular steel tower about 420 feet tall, and by the fall of 1906 a high-frequency alternator built by General Electric to designs Ernst Alexanderson developed for him could generate continuous waves at 75 to 100 kilohertz.
Then came the night radio people still tell stories about. By Fessenden's own later account, shipboard operators of the United Fruit Company and the Navy along the Atlantic coast had been told to listen on Christmas Eve, 1906. At nine o'clock, after a Morse CQ from Brant Rock, came something no operator expected: a man's voice. Fessenden spoke briefly, played a phonograph record of Handel's Largo, then picked up his violin and played O Holy Night, singing as he played. He read the Christmas words from Luke, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will, wished his listeners a Merry Christmas, and promised another program on New Year's Eve. Fessenden reported the Christmas Eve broadcast was heard as far south as Norfolk, Virginia.
Broadcasting would not become an industry for more than another decade, and Fessenden, prickly and litigious, spent years fighting over his patents while others took the fame. But the direction he pointed never reversed. Spark died out, continuous wave won, amplitude modulation carried voices and music into homes, and the first licensed amateurs who signed on after 1912 inherited a medium that could already speak and sing. Every ham who has ever keyed a microphone owes a little debt to a snowy December question asked across one Maryland mile: is it snowing where you are?