Talking Radio
Tonight the thoughts of many children will turn to Father Christmas, but today we should also be remembering the Father of Radio Broadcasting. Who he? Marconi? No, none other than Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden...the man who proved that radio waves could be used to transmit speech and music and not just Morse code.
Christmas Eve is an important date in Fessenden's story because it was on the 24th December 1906 - six years after his first experiments in transmitting speech -that he used his new alternator transmitter to send out a sequence of programmes that included violin music and a passage from the Bible. Thus he also invented religious broadcasting as well.
There should have been a Scottish dimension to that story because Fessenden had built two huge masts. One was at Brant Rock in Massachusetts and the other at in Argyll. Alas, the Scottish mast collapsed before the big day, so the transmissions went, instead, to shipboard radio operators in the Atlantic.
Fessenden's system of Amplitude Modulation is still in use today. The next time your listening to Sportsound on 810 MW then spare a thought for Reg.
Spare a thought also for the folk at Talk 107 in Edinburgh. The station has gone out of business and last night they transmitted their last programme. They played "We don't talk anymore" and after that, just dead air. For those of us who work in radio, that's the saddest of sounds.
I've written about the station a few times on this blog and have described my friendship with its original programme director Colin Paterson. I'll leave it to others to comment on for its demise. I had always applauded the attempt to do something different and I'm genuinely sorry to see it go. I hope the staff there have some bright opportunities in the year ahead.
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