Reginald Fessenden created the system for transmitting music and speech by radio, known as AM (amplitude modulation).
When Fessenden was the head of electrical engineering at Western University in 1893, he became inspired by the developments in radio made by Marconi. But Marconi's system could only transmit Morse code and Fessenden wanted to transmit voices and music.
The professor developed a way for sound to be 'piggy-backed' on a radio wave, where the wave was removed at the receiving end so only the original sounds were heard. He made his first long-range broadcast on Christmas Eve 1906 from the coast of Massachusetts. It was heard hundreds of miles out to sea by amazed and delighted ship radio operators
Although it wouldn't be fully developed until after the First World War I, this idea revolutionised the way radio was used. Up to then radio had been conceived for one-to-one communication, like a private conversation, but now people realised that radio broadcasts could entertain and inform a mass audience.
