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Reginald Fessenden Conducts the First Audio Radio Broadcast of Entertainment and Music

12/24/1906
Fessenden's Brant Rock radio transmitting tower
Fessenden's Brant Rock radio transmitting tower

On December 24, 1906 Canadian American inventor Reginald A. Fessenden made the first audio radio (as distinct from Morse code) broadcast of entertainment and music to a general audience, broadcasting from Brant Rock on the coast of Massachusetts. This is considered the beginning of amplitude modulation broadcasting, or AM radio.

The program included Fessenden playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage, Luke Chapter 2, from the Bible. The main audience for this transmission was an unknown number of shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast. 

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