In article , (Dennis
Ferguson) writes:

Len Over 21 wrote:
In article , "Jim Hampton"
Hans Brakob came out of the blue with a personally insulting comment
about "bad research," something that I allegedly "always do," solely
about "the first voice transmission by radio." Hans claimed, but did
not reference or otherwise verify that it was done with a SPARK
TRANSMITTER.

I quoted an Electronics magazine special edition text paragraph that
stated this 1906 Christmas transmission was done with a 1 KW
ALTERNATOR, probably using a water cooled microphone in the
antenna line.

Just to clarify, this is what the article at

http://ewh.ieee.org/reg/7/millennium...fferences.html

says about it:

At the turn of the century Fessenden was using a spark transmitter,
employing a Wehnelt interrupter operating a Ruhmkorff induction
coil. In 1899 he noted, when the key was held down for a long dash,
that the peculiar wailing sound of the Wehnelt interrupter
could be clearly heard in the receiving telephone. He must have had
a detector of some sort that was working for him, even at this
early stage in the development of wireless. This suggested to him
that by using a spark rate well above voice band (10,000 sparks/sec),
wireless telephony could be achieved; and this he did transmitting
speech over a distance of 1.5 km on 23 December 1900, between 15 metre
masts on Cob Island, MD [Belrose, 1994a; 1994b].

In autumn of 1906 Fessenden had his HF alternator working adequately
on frequencies up to about 100 kHz. About midnight in
November, 1906 Mr. Stein at Fessenden's Brant Rock station was telling
the operator at a nearby test station at Plymouth, MA how to
run the HF alternator. It was usual for these two operators to use speech
over this short distance. However his voice was heard by Mr. Armor at
Machrihanish, Scotland with such clarity that there was no doubt about
the speaker, and the station log books confirmed the report

[...]

Fessenden's greatest success took place on Christmas Eve 1906, when he
and his colleagues presented the world's first wireless broadcast. The
transmission included a speech by Fessenden and selected music for
Christmas.

So, while the first radio voice broadcast was made at Christmas, 1906, using
an alternator, the first radio voice transmission of any sort was made 6
years earlier using a spark transmitter.

I agree with what you said here but that is NOT what the brought
on Hans Brakob's ranting, raving, and jellied jeremiad about "poor
research."

Brakob SPECIFICALLY stated that Fessenden's 1906 Christmas
voice broadcast used a SPARK transmitter. Miccolis, presumably in
Brakob's defense, tried to misdirect by pointing out the 1900 test by
Fessenden with the 1906 broadcast. Miccolis did not correct Brakob's
false statement, but attempted to misdirect into other subjects when
Brakob was confronted with his error.

My general source of old radio histories are several but I keep one
on the bookshelf, the Electronics magazine special 50th Anniversary
edition that covered ALL electronics and radio prior to 1980. Right or
wrong, printed matter cannot be changed by any webmaster or
website author. For Internet sources of old radio history, I prefer
the excellent works of Thomas H. White, at the new address of

http://earlyradiohistory.us/index.html

There is a close correlation of what the 1980 Electronics magazine
description of the 1906 Christmas voice broadcast and what White has
in more detail on his site. The microphone for Fessenden's 1906
broadcast was not water cooled (as Electronics writers speculated)
but air cooled and the picture on White's pages indicates it is robust
and designed to dissipate heat (as the photo caption put it).

Jack (formally John) Belrose is a familiar name to Antennex readers
(www.antennex.com, a specialty site for antennas) and his recreations
of early spark transmitters as they MIGHT have been made by
Fessenden are interesting. However, let's face it, Fessenden's first
experiment in 1900 was done with only ONE OTHER experimenter
only ONE MILE distant and witnessed by no one else.

Fessenden's experimental broadcasts (plural, involving several things
in communication) at Brant Rock involved many persons, primarily
financial backers paying for everything. Radio was a hot item and
many were getting involved for a piece of the action back then. Radio
in those prehistoric times involved money (few components available,
nearly everyone had to build everything themselves) so it was seldom
an "amateur" activity. In Thomas H. White's pages you will note that
Fessenden dropped out of the radio experimentation game after that
historic voice broadcast due to disagreement with his backers.

That 1906 voice broadcast involved a 750 Watt alternator "RF source"
at 70 KHz and the "modulator" was a carbon microphone in series
with the antenna feed line. [technically that is "down modulation" of
a carrier, no gain of RF power on peaks as with conventional AM] It
stands to reason that the heat losses in that microphone were
considerable (hence the obvious robust design in the White collection
photo). Manual holding of such a microphone would be prohibitive,
much the same as an American Beauty 100 W soldering iron uses
an insulating wooden handle. Practical application of the Fessenden
voice broadcasting experiment was an obvious no-no. There were no
interested parties eager to buy rights to the system and, for the times,
no one wanted to pirate the system.

Yes, Reginald Fessenden is acredited with being the first to broadcast
voice on radio frequencies. No argument from me on that.

Hans Brakob is NOT a qualified judge of fact correction when he
confuses both dates (6 years difference) and the type of transmitter
and then contends that another is "guilty of poor research."

The description of how the spark transmitter was used to transmit voice
makes perfect sense to me. If you take a band-limited continuous waveform
and transmit discrete samples of the waveform taken at a rate which is twice
the maximum continuous frequency (i.e. 10,000 amplitude-modulated sparks
per second for 5 kHz bandwidth audio), then low-pass filtering the received
signal back to the original bandwidth will reproduce the original continuous
waveform. This is from the Nyquist(-Shannon) sampling theorem, though if
I recall this was done a quarter century before Nyquist's paper on digital
(telegraph) signals over bandwidth-limited analog channels and a half-century
before Shannon explained what this meant for discrete sampling. That's
pretty neat.

A lot of early papers on electricity and "radio" may "sound neat" but,
despite the descriptions by learned gentlemen with many letters
after their names are FAR from "neat" when seen today. Reginald
Fessenden did not invent sampling theory any more than Lee deForest
invented electron geometry inside vacuum tubes. Both had IDEAS,
inspirations, hunches, bursts of thought or whatever and were willing
to tinker and try. Some succeeded. Many did not.

A Professor Langley convinced the US Navy that they should under-
write his aeroplane thing and even converted an old Navy vessel to be
the first aircraft carrier (or one with a landing area). Nice try. The
Langley aeroplane flew...off the end of the deck and into the water.
Splash. TS. Off in another place a couple of bicycle mechanics were
busy tinkering with rudimentary aeronautical engineering and made the
FIRST heavier-than-air powered flights...and won the first US military
contract for a heavier-than-air-craft (by the Army's Signal Corps) to
start the whole aircraft world.

By some VERY elastic stretching of things, one can say (presumably
with a straight face) that James Clerk Maxwell "invented EM radio
propagation" by coming up with his equations...or that Heinrich
Hertz was "the first VHF operator" or "used spark the first time for
radio propagation." I wouldn't. Few would...even though, in a mighty
exaggerated way, those are true. Some would go to such lengths for
newsgroup message points and "getting even" with another and devote
a large part of their free time absorbed in such. :-)

There are MANY, many "firsts" in radio and none can claim to be THE
first. Unfortunately, some folks have devoted hero-worship of certain
individuals and over-emphasize their accomplishments; their righteous
anger at not finding agreement leads them to outrageous statements
in here. Not my problem...until they start to get personal. :-)

LHA