[opendtv] Re: Broadcasting is 100 years old

It occurs to me that in 100 years we have come full circle.
The article below stated that very few people could receive Fessenden's transmission unless they were "equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers' or maybe there were 
some early crystal radios in the hands of experimenters that night.
At any rate, here we are, 100 years later and very few in the U.S. can receive free over the air digital TV transmissions because there are relatively few receivers either for sale or that work.
Tonight's ABC World News program added to the problem by stating that most people can't 
get digital TV because they don't realize they need a subscription for it.
With disinformation like that at the network level, OTA will be gone soon after 2009. 

flyback1 wrote:


http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/23/1327237&from=rss
"On Christmas eve 1906 <http://www.southgatearc.org/news/december2006/king_of_the_radio_waves.htm>, a Canadian physicist named Reginald Fessenden <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Fessenden> presented the world's first wireless radio broadcast from his transmitter at Brant Rock, MA. The transmission included Christmas music and was heard by radio operators on board US Navy and United Fruit Company ships equipped with Fessenden's wireless receivers at various distances over the South and North Atlantic, and in the West Indies. Fessenden was a key rival of Marconi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi> in the early 1900s who, using morse-code, succeeded in passing signals across the Atlantic in 1901. Fessenden's work was the first real departure from Marconi's damped-wave-coherer system for telegraphy <http://www.ieee.ca/millennium/radio/radio_differences.html> and represent the first pioneering steps toward radio communications and radio broadcasting. He later became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute over the control of his radio-related patents, which were eventually acquired by RCA." 

John Willkie wrote:


Apparently, I was wrong on the date.  It was december 24th 1906.


John Willkie


------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:opendtv-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Willkie 
Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2006 2:41 PM
To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [opendtv] Broadcasting is 100 years old
Unless I've done something wrong with my math, within an hour of my sending this message, "broadcasting" will be 100 years old.
Broadcasting in the sense of electronic wireless communications transmitted from a single point and intended for simultaneous reception by members of the general public at multiple locations.
The event was of course the transmission, on Cape Cod, on the evening of December 26, 1906, by Professor Reginald E. Fessenden, of poetry and a musical selection. Not a single dot-dash.
Since there were few to none receivers (the Audion tube was a few years in the future), I've never heard of any reception reports.
May broadcasting's next 100 years be as dynamic and prolific as the last 100. 


John Willkie

Other related posts: