Radio days at Brant Rock

A lonely transmission pole rises from the roof of a modest building nestled among trailer homes in Brant Rock, bleating out the forgotten pulse of radio history -- long, short, short, short; long, long, long -- or ''B.O." in Morse code.

The radio beacon, the call letters of a radio station that once broadcast from this corner of Marshfield a century ago, is a radio wave monument to an inventor who pioneered a year of radio ''firsts" in Brant Rock in 1906. Reginald A. Fessenden, a Canadian-born engineer and inventor who came to Marshfield to work at the radio station, was then forgotten by history, even as his legacy spread into homes, cars, and ships across the world.

Tomorrow, radio hams worldwide will kick off the centennial of Fessenden's big year in radio, when they will meet on the airwaves, establishing contact with the revived Brant Rock station, and exchange postcards with a special cancellation mark from the seaside neighborhood that pushed radio forward so long ago.

''The whole idea . . . is to seize the year -- carpe annum," said Edward Perry, head of WATD, a commercial radio station in Marshfield, and a Fessenden admirer. ''What we have here is, this 2006, we have a centennial that is really important to the industry, marks the first time people actually saw a demonstration of radio as an entertainment medium instead of just a replacement of a telegraph wire."

The breakthroughs began on Jan. 2, 1906, when the Brant Rock station, owned by the National Electric Signaling Co., began sending wireless Morse code communications to its sister tower in Machrihanish, Scotland. Eight days later, the 420-foot-high radio tower that once swayed high above Brant Rock picked up the first transatlantic reply: ''Condensers working very satisfactorily" buzzed over the airwaves from Scotland, according to a book by Fessenden's wife, Helen.

''To another generation . . . all this may seem very tame, but then it was HISTORY -- news from the mould of Time," she wrote in ''Fessenden: Builder of Tomorrows."

Other successes followed quickly. By fall that year, the Scottish station heard voices for the first time, when the station overheard a conversation between radio operators in Brant Rock and Plymouth. On Christmas Eve the same year, Fessenden broadcast the first radio program. US Navy ships, as well as United Fruit Co. ships from Norfolk, Va., to the West Indies, heard Fessenden give a short speech followed by Handel's ''Largo" played on a phonograph. Fessenden then played and sang ''O, Holy Night" -- ''though the singing of course was not very good," according to an excerpt from Fessenden's papers quoted in the book.

That broadcast broke the mold: ''Suddenly, what Fessenden saw was, you can use radio to transmit not only voice, but to entertain people," Perry said. ''It wasn't to communicate as you might with a telephone or a telegraph; it was entertainment. . . . It was stupendous."

Even so, most people today associate radio with Guglielmo Marconi rather than Fessenden. While Marconi was the first to send transatlantic wireless messages one way and was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics, Fessenden has been largely forgotten, even though his work represented a significant step toward modern-day radio.

''The technology used by Marconi bears no resemblance to the technology used today," John S. Belrose, an emeritus radio scientist researcher at the Communications Research Centre in Canada, wrote in an e-mail.

To transmit messages, Marconi used a ''spark gap transmitter," a technology that created short pulses of radio waves that could not easily carry voice. Fessenden developed a way to use continuous radio waves that could carry not just messages in code, but also voices and music -- a precursor to AM radio.

Fessenden's work, Belrose argues, were pioneering steps toward modern-day radio. ''Fessenden, a genius and a mathematician, was the inventor of radio as we know it today," he wrote in a piece presented to the International Conference on 100 Years of Radio in 1995.

Today, the remnants of the original radio signal tower -- bare slabs of reinforced concrete, conical porcelain insulators sandwiched in between, and a huge bell-shaped pivot point on top -- are nestled behind homes in Blackman's Point trailer park, far from view. The transmitter and pole sending out the modern-day ''B.O." beacon sit nearby.

Every once in a while, a fanatical visitor will come to Brant Rock in search of the tower to pay homage to Fessenden, said Maureen Blackman, whose husband's family has long owned the land on which the monument sits. But the Fessenden name and his accomplishments are known mostly just to the radio hams who fondly refer to him as ''Reggie" or ''Fesse."

''I call him Reggie because we're soul mates -- I love this guy," said Dave ''Sparks" Riley, a ham-radio fanatic from Marshfield who has worked to revive Fessenden's story and raise appreciation for the man's contributions, not only as a radio man but also as an inventor and entrepreneur.

This summer, the town will attempt to save this hero of radio from obscurity, with plans for a radio-themed festival, a 42-foot-tall scale replica of the original tower that was torn down in 1917, and an annual reprisal of the original Christmas Eve broadcast.

Perry is also looking forward to settling an issue that has long been contentious among radio historians -- proving that Fessenden really was the first radio broadcaster, rather than Nathan Stubblefield, a Kentucky farmer who reportedly invented and demonstrated a wireless telephone in 1902. ''We contend he never broadcast on the radio," Perry said.

The ''B.O." signal has been broadcasting for months now, and it has already been copied in Los Angeles and Germany. And Carl Russell, master of the Daniel Webster Masonic Lodge, led efforts to refurbish the stonework around the remnants of the old tower, largely neglected since World War I.

Across the Atlantic, Duncan McArthur, a Scottish radio ham, said that Machrihanish will reactivate its station this month and dedicate a small memorial on the site next summer. The town is also considering a commemorative event for next winter, he said.

''Seems a shame he is not remembered more, as he was way ahead of Marconi," McArthur wrote in a telegraph-like e-mail. ''Fessenden not known about at all here. But will change this."

For more information on2006 events andFessenden's history, visit www.radiocom.net/Fessenden. Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.