THE HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICAL PROSPECTING
PART SEVEN - REGINALD FESSENDEN

Chapter 18  -  Radio and Sound Transmission

On Cobb Island, Fessenden set to work with his crew to erect two masts fifty feet high and one mile apart. With the towers up, experimentation went forward with energy and dispatch. At Cobb Island, in December of 1900, intelligible speech by electromagnetic waves was for the first time transmitted. Professor Fessenden was able to obtain communications results far in advanee of the original expectations of the Weather Bureau. Ships many hundreds of miles away were able to piek up signals from the Cobb Island station. In fact, communications results were so promising that the head of the Weather Bureau now asked to be assigned some of the Fessenden radio patents. When Fessenden refused what he considered to be an absurd and unjustified demand, money and appropriations for research dwindled to nothing, and all sorts of obstacles were put in Reg’s path.

Fessenden wrote a letter of protest to the President of the United States but it did no good. After months of trying to fight government redtape, he resigned his Federal job in 1902. The National Electric Signaling Company was now organized. Fessenden placed his patents in the newly formed corporation and accepted the position of Director of Research.

The National Electric Signaling Company set to work on a project to transmit wireless signals between the British Isles and the United States. The British government gave its consent to the erection of a 400 feet radio tower at Machrihanish in Scotland. A similar 400 foot tower was erected under the direction of Reginald Fessenden at Brant Rock, off the Massachusetts coast. A team, carefully selected and instructed by Fessenden was sent to ScotIand to erect the European tower and to handle the transmission of signals from that end. He was driving himself and his assistants unmercifully.

Fessenden was a hard taskmaster. He worked far into the night, every night, and expected his men to give of their utmost, also. Charles J. Pannill, a pioneer in wireless in his own right and later to become President of the Radiomarine Corporation of America, had this to say of his association with Reginald Fessenden in those trying days at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, "I worked with Fessenden from 1902 to 1910. He was a great character, of splendid physique, but what a temper! Many of us were fired on more than one occasion, and usually on some slight provocation. When he cooled off, he was sorry and hired us back, always at higher pay. He had marvelous vision; he told me in 1903 of things that would happen in wireless 20 years later, and they all have come true.“

Between 1902 and 1905 Fessenden perfected the high-frequency alternator, radio telephony, the electrolytic detector and the heterodyne, or "beat" receiver. The 400 foot towers were not completed until December 28, 1905. In the opening days of 1906, for the first time in the history of the world, two-way trans-Atlantic wireless telegraph messages were sent and received. Brant Rock in Massachusetts sent out a message on January 2, 1906, which was received by Machrihanish, Scotland. On January 3, 1906, Brant Rock received a message sent out by Machrihanish. For nearly a year, the messages traveled back and forth. Then on December 5, 1906, the transmissions came to an end; for Machrihanish Radio Tower crashed to earth in the middle of a heavy storm.

In the fall of 1906 work was weIl advanced on the perfection of the wireless telephone. Feeble voice signals were picked up one evening by Machrihanish. It could never be verified that the signals had originated at Brant Rock. On Christmas Eve of 1906, the first radio broadcast ever to be put on the air, took place. Music and the human voice were sent out from Brant Rock and were received as far away as Norfolk, Virginia. On New Year Eve a similar program from Brant Rock was picked up in the West Indies. It was not until many years later that Marconi succeeded in transmitting such voice and music programs.

With the crashing of the Machrihanish Tower the end had been reached fot the National Electric Signaling Company, insofar as trans-Atlantic messages were concerned. In 1907, Brant Rock, long the abode of the Fessenden family and the Fessenden group of scientists, was abandoned.

On April 15, 1912, Titanic became the symbol and the synonym for disaster. At 2:20 A.M., "The Titanic," the largest ship afloat, pride of the White Star Steamship Line and supposedly unsinkable, on her maiden voyage, crashed head-on and at full speed into an iceberg. In 1912, the peoples of the earth thought that such a thing as a world war was an impossibility. To such an age of innocence the 1513 lives lost out of a total complement of 2224 on board, when the "Titanic" sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, seemed like the most appalling of human tragedies.

To Reginald Fessenden, the sinking of the "Titanic" was a source of more than the usual sense of horror. Fessenden knew that with the proper instrumentation, such dangers could be eliminated from the sea lanes.

Fessenden's name is best known for the various important safety devices and navigational aids he perfected for the United Statcs Navy. Now these instruments can be found aboard all vessels, war ship and commercial craft a-like. The adoption of the use of these instruments did not come easy. Throughout World War One, our Navy refused to listen to Fessenden's ideas. The Navy Board in charge of new instruments would never allow Fessenden to speak before that august body. They even refused to read any of the communications that he addressed to them. Fessenden had the answer to submarine warfare but his voice could not be heard in the labyrinth that was Washington. With the war over, Fessenden's inventions became respectable as peacetime naval instrumentation.

In August of 1912, while on a visit to Boston, Reg ran into an old friend. This fellow scientist took Fessenden to the plant of the Submarine Signal Company where he was working. There a lively discussion ensued between the one-time professor of electrical engineering and the physicists of the Submarine Signal Company. Fessenden joined the company and was put in charge of a sound ranging device of his invention which would make ships safe from approaching icebergs.

Fessenden's echo-ranger was tried out on land and it was tried out at sea. The fundamental principle was simple enough. He used an oscillator to send out sound waves. The emissions of the oscillator were picked up by the iceberg and the echoes sent back to be observed and recorded aboard the ship. Thus the ship would be warned of the approaching iceberg, even though it were obscured by darkness, low clouds or fog. Every ocean going vessel today is equipped with a Fessenden Fathometer and iceberg detection is only one of its minor uses. The Fathometer records the depth of the water beneath the ship at all times. As a war measure, it spots submarines anywhere in the vicinity of the ship.

Many and varied other patents in the use of sound issued from Fessenden's applications between 1912 and 1919. Up until 1912 the universal practice was to use small diaphragms in telephone receivers and in loud speakers. It was in that year that Reginald Fessenden discovered that the proper diaphragm to most effectively and fully reproduce the tones of the human voice was eleven or more inches in diameter. Patent applications to cover this important discovery were filed in December, 1912, and January, 1913. A patent on the distribution of sound in a large auditorium was filed in 1917 and issued in 1919. All modern loud speakers follow the Fessenden principle.

In June, 1915, Fessenden filed for a patent for his method of locating enemy gun positions. At the invitation of the British War Office and the British Admiralty, Reginald Fessenden sailed to England on the "Olympic" on September 2, 1914. Upon arriving in London, he drew up a four part Memorandum for the War Office. Number One on the list was entitled "Location of Concealed Artillery.“ We have no idea whether Fessenden's ideas were directed into the proper channels. As will be related in the section devoted to Sound Ranging, major credit for the success of these operations go to two Englishmen, Lucien Bull and Sir Lawrence Bragg.

On January 29, 1913, the patent application for the "Fessenden Oscillator" was made, to be issued on January 23, 1917. Sound waves were transmitted and received through water at distances of more than a hundred miles. A method of signaling through the earth was filed on October 7, 1915, and  issued June 25, 1918. The fundamental patent insofar as the seismic detection of structures favorable to the accumulation of oil and gas and of structures favorable to ore deposits, was filed by Reginald Fessenden on April 2, 1914, and issued by the patent office on September 18, 1917. The title of this application was "Method and Apparatus For Locating Ore Bodies.“

In the spring of 1913 oscillators were taken out to a farm owned by one of the employes of the Submarine Signaling Company in the vicinity of Framingham, Massaehusetts, and experiments were conducted there by Fessenden and his assistants over aperiod of several years. Various frequencies were used in transmitting and receiving the sound waves. Various methods of communicating the vibration to the earth were tested. Experiments were run using various kinds of soil; clay, sandy rock, rock outcrops and others. Sound measurements were satisfactorily made up to a distance of three miles, and deemed possible for a much greater distance. The earth itself was found to have quite definite periods of vibration. The most pronounced one was almost exactly sixteen-per second.

In 1918 and 1919 a weIl was dug in the solid rock at Nahant and an oscillator placed in it and other oscillators placed about 400 yards away, and at a distance of a mile and a half away. The signals were then transmitted from the oscillator in the weIl to the oscillators in the water, through rock in one case and through rock and sand in the other case. The signals were quite weIl received by the weIl oscillator. In this case, also, echoes from reflected waves were received and measured. The echoes were recorded photographically.

Early in 1914 Fessenden's apparatus and system for locating ore bodies were disclosed to Dr. Frank and to Dr. Halske in Berlin. These physicists indicated no particular interest at the time but Dr. Frank asked for more details by mail in 1915. After an exchange of letters, it was deemed expedient to let the matter rest until the close of the war. On July 15, 1922, Fessenden received a letter from Dr. Frank stating that one of his associated companies was interested in scientific investigation of a gelolgical character. Fessenden mailed additional information to Germany on July 25, 1922. There was considerable correspondence and a few interviews but the matter reached no conclusion and was finally dropped.

In the early 1920s and possibly as early as 1919, the first discussions between Everette De Golyer and Reginald Fessenden were held in Boston with regard to the patent of "Method and Apparatus for Locating Ore Bodies." De Golyer made many, many trips from New York to Boston in the early twenties to see Fessenden. Fessenden talked long and earnestly about the possibilities of using seisrnic waves to locate ore bodies and to locate oil structures. Fessenden learned much geology and De Golyer began to have a clearer idea of the physical problems involved.

In 1925, these negotiations, to a large extend, were turned over to Dr. John Clarence Karcher, who was by that time working for De Golyer. Karcher became weIl acquainted with Reginald Fessenden; the two physicists exchanged pertinent facts and figures. After a thorough investigation, Karcher and De Golyer mutually agreed that the Fessenden patent was fundamental and that it should be acquired by the Geophysical Research Corporation. The ore-finding patent was purchased from Fessenden for the use of the Amerada Petroleum Corporation and its subsidiary, the Geophysical Research Corporation. The GRC started to build a set of seismograph instruments for the especial purpose of locating earth structures favorable to the accumulation of oil and gas. This enterprise would turn out to be the most successful of all seismie discovery programs. GRC crews took the field on a contract basis in the spring of 1926.

Reginald Fessenden received many honors during the 1920s including the Medal of Honor of the Institute of Radio Engineers; the City of Philadelphia. xxxx Scott medal, and the Scientic American Medal. Late in the 1920s Fessenden retired and Reg and Helen left Chester HilI, Massachusetts, to return to the cene of their youthful romance, Bermuda. Reginald Fessenden died in Bermuda on July 23, 1932. Fessenden's patents in communications and sound are unrivalled. Only one American inventor holds a higher rank, Thomas Edison.