Fessenden, Reginald A. The Deluged Civilization of the Caucasus Isthmus, Chapter XI.
Massachusetts Bible Society, Boston, Mass. 1927 12”x 8.75”: 4pp of maps, (ii), 21pp. Printed on very heavy stock, and bound in wrappers. Limited edition of 250 copies, this being copy #XIII. This is copy XIII, inscribed by Fessenden to the “Congressional Library” (Library of Congress”).
Good/VG copy, the oversize pamphlet having a few bumps and short tears and dusting to the printed wrappers. The text however is FINE. $250
Provenance: Library of Congress, with their “surplus/duplicate” rubber stamp on the rear cover.
Fessenden was a great figure in the history of radio (who was awarded over 500 patents), and later in life undertook a project to find and identify the pre-Noahic flood civilizations in the Caucasus. There's not much I can say about that part of his career, so I won't say anything. I do know that there is a somewhat tortured history to the publication of this work, bits and pieces published here and there, with a large part of the work edited and published post-death by Fessenden's son.
Reginald A. Fessenden (1866-1932), father of radiotelephony (which was what wireless transmission of speech was called at the time), radio and SONAR pioneer.
Fessenden is best known for his pioneering work developing radio technology, including the foundations of amplitude modulation (AM) radio. (“In 1900 Fessenden left the university to conduct experiments in wireless telegraphy for the U.S. Weather Bureau, which wanted to adapt radiotelegraphy to weather forecasting. Impatient with the simple on-off transmission of Morse Code signals, he became interested in transmitting continuous sound, particularly that of the human voice. He developed the idea of superimposing an electric signal, oscillating at the frequencies of sound waves, upon a radio wave of constant frequency, so as to modulate the amplitude of the radio wave into the shape of the sound wave. “)==Encyclopedia Britannica
His achievements included the first transmission of speech by radio (1900), and the first two-way radiotelegraphic communication across the Atlantic Ocean (1906). In 1932 he reported that, in late 1906, he also made the first radio broadcast of entertainment and music, although a lack of verifiable details has led to some doubts about this claim. John Scott Medal, which included a cash prize of $800, for "his invention of a reception scheme for continuous wave telegraphy and telephony"--enwikipedia
“Canadian radio pioneer who on Christmas Eve in 1906 broadcast the first program of music and voice ever transmitted over long distances.”--Encyclopedia Britannica
responding to the Titanic disaster in 1912 Fessenden is credited with the invention and development of the first modern transducer used in a sonar. Thomas R. Howarth and Geoffrey R. Moss, “The Fessenden Oscillator: The first sonar transducer”, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 136, 2131 (2014)
And at the time of his death the New York Herald Tribune wrote "Fessenden Against the World", which said:
It sometimes happens, even in science, that one man can be right against the world. Professor Fessenden was that man. It is ironic that among the hundreds of thousands of young radio engineers whose commonplaces of theory rest on what Professor Fessenden fought for bitterly and alone only a handful realize that the battle ever happened... It was he who insisted, against the stormy protests of every recognized authority, that what we now call radio was worked by "continuous waves" of the kind discovered by Hertz, sent through the ether by the transmitting station as light waves are sent out by a flame. Marconi and others insisted, instead, that what was happening was the so-called "whiplash effect"... It is probably not too much to say that the progress of radio was retarded a decade by this error... The whiplash theory faded gradually out of men's minds and was replaced by the continuous wave one with all too little credit to the man who had been right...
“If Canadian radio archives do not contain as much material as they should, there is one historical event well documented - the achievement of Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian who made radio history by transmitting the letter "s" in Morse code from Cornwall, England to a receiving station on Signal Hill overlooking St. John's Harbour in Newfoundland on December 12, 1901. But an equally historic event, the achievement of a brilliant Canadian inventor, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, is generally ignored and largely unknown. On December 24, 1906, at 9 P.M. eastern standard time, Reginald Fessenden transmitted human voices from Brant Rock near Boston, Massachusetts to several ships at sea owned by the United Fruit Company.”--IEEE Canada, “Reginald Fessenden -- Pioneer of wireless radio and telephony”
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