From your ARRL:
Newington, CT Mar 17, 2006 — “Hello!” -the first spoken word to be heard over the radio a century ago. The ARRL, the national association for Amateur Radio, is celebrating 100 years of voice over the airwaves in 2006.
As a boy, Reginald Fessenden heard his uncle describe Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. The 10 year-old asked, “Why do they need wires?” He then spent much of his life trying to figure it out.
His early attempts at voice transmission were unintelligible. Then, on December 23, 1900, he was able to pass a voice message by radio to his assistant. His first word was “Hello.â€
Later, while working to improve wireless Morse code type communication between land stations and ships at sea, he continued his voice experiments. Working in secrecy, he planned a surprise for a 9 p.m. broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906. Shipboard radio operators had been tipped to listen for something special during the December 24 transmission, but no one could have anticipated what happened. At the appointed hour, radio operators across the North Atlantic were surprised to hear, not the expected Morse code tapping, but a voice coming from their radios, calling “CQ, CQ”. It was Fessenden beginning the very first “radio program.†After a brief introduction, he played music. The planned Bible readings by Mrs. Fessenden and his secretary had to be quickly covered by the inventor as the first cases of microphone fright occurred when both women froze.
While commercial broadcasting didn’t begin for another 14 years after Fessenden’s historic first broadcast in 1906, thousands of inquisitive amateur hobbyists began to experiment with this new fangled technology. They were, and are still, called “Amateur Radio†operators. They labored in attics, barns, garages and cellars to perfect what we now call radio. In the USA, they formed the American Radio Relay League (ARRL).
These Amateur Radio operators, also known as “hams”, continue to be at the forefront of developing technologies years in advance of when they are rolled out to the public. FM, television, and even our small mobile telephones were all used by Amateur Radio operators many years ahead of the public.
You can find Amateur Radio groups in your area at http://www.hello-radio.org . Visit one and say, “Hello!”
The purpose of this site is to introduce the public to amateur radio, so I’m not really sure about the premise of “celebrating 100 years of voices,” but it does have a lot of good information about ham radio, presented in a way that most non-hams will find interesting.
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