Reginald Fessenden

Reginald Fessenden was a Canadian-American inventor and radio engineer whose work on continuous-wave transmission helped make amplitude-modulated radio, capable of carrying voice and music rather than only the on-off pulses of Morse code, technically practical in the early twentieth century. Fessenden is traditionally credited with an early public radio broadcast of voice and music on Christmas Eve 1906, though the scale, audience and even the exact date of that broadcast have been disputed by later historians, a caveat the wider historical record generally acknowledges. Fessenden held several hundred patents over his career, spanning radio, sonar and other fields, and worked at various points for the United States Weather Bureau, his own National Electric Signaling Company, and other electrical firms.