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Reginald Aubrey Fessenden
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REGINALD AUBREY FESSENDEN
have been a remarkable boon to those who must trust their lives to the sea, especially the turbo-electric drive for battleships, and the iceberg detector. The oscillator shown in photograph C is now used on submarines for telegraphing under water, for detecting other submarines, and for telephoning between submarines submerged to a depth of 100 ft. at a distance apart of 10 miles, and for taking continuous soundings while steaming at full speed.
Professor Fessenden is at the present moment working not at some new radio improvement, but on a device by which one thousand pages of ordinary sized print can be reproduced in a space of a one inch square and read by means of projection on a 6" x 8" screen attached to the arm of a chair, the whole device is so small as to be carried about in an overcoat pocket. By photographing on and fusing into a kind of quartz by a method of his own invention, it is possible to preserve records in perpetuity upon a surface so minute as to be almost indiscernible to the naked eyes.
The man who is responsible for these remarkable inventions, as well as for a system of storing power at an annual cost of three cents per kilowatt hour in banks from which power can be withdrawn, and in which it may
be redeposited by the consumers at any time; and for the proposal in 191 1 to make sun and wind provide all the power needed for mechanical use without dependence upon coal, is as remarkable in appearance and in personality as he is in intellect. He is a huge, bearded giant, well-built, genial, of stately bearing and impressive manners. In describing his discoveries he speaks without a great deal of enthusiasm, but with much precision and detail, in the manner of one describing the work of a third person. He rarely mentions himself in connection with his most remarkable inventions, but discusses them in the passive. Perhaps this reticence about himself and the fact that he is always willing to give credit to his assistants are reasons that he is not more widely known in this country.
In the combined study and laboratory of his beautiful home at Chestnut Hill, Brookline, overlooking the Reservoir, he spends many hours a day with his experiments, among his pieces of apparatus, his photographs, and his books. But he is not always working. He has two hobbies, golf and shooting. The wall in a corner of the big room is covered with
C. Oscillator used on submarines for telegraphing under water, and for telephoning between submarines submerged to a depth of 100 feet at a distance apart of 10 miles