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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63160 Medium Reginald Fessenden: radio voices, patents and a disputed first broadcast

Read the following passage.

A. Reginald Fessenden was born on October 6, 1866, in East Bolton, Quebec. He studied at Bishop's College in Lennoxville and then went to Bermuda as headmaster of the Whitney Institute, a middle school. In the United States he worked with Thomas Edison, becoming head chemist at the Edison laboratory in West Orange, and later worked with George Westinghouse. In 1892 he became the first professor of electrical engineering at Purdue University. From 1893 to 1900 he held the same kind of post at the Western University of Pennsylvania, which is now the University of Pittsburgh.

B. Most early wireless systems, including Marconi's, sent signals as short bursts from an electric spark. Fessenden believed that a continuous wave would work far better and could carry speech and music. While working for the United States Weather Bureau, he achieved the first transmission of the human voice by radio in December 1900. He also worked out the principle of heterodyning, in which a signal produced inside the receiver is mixed with the incoming one. His time at the bureau ended badly. The bureau chief wanted control of his patents, and Fessenden resigned in 1902.

C. With two Pittsburgh investors, Thomas Given and Hay Walker, he formed the National Electric Signalling Company, and in 1905 he set up a laboratory at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. In November and December 1906 he sent speech across the Atlantic Ocean. On December 21, 1906, he showed engineers and newspaper editors that speech and phonograph records could be sent by radio from Brant Rock to Plymouth. He is often said to have made the first broadcast of music on Christmas Eve that year. However, that date seems to come from a letter he wrote in 1932, and a later researcher found no press report or radio log from 1906 that mentions the program.

D. After disputes with Given and Walker over marketing, Fessenden ended his connection with the company in 1911 and began legal proceedings against them over the ownership of his patents. His claims were not resolved until 1928. From 1912 he worked with the Submarine Signal Company of Boston and developed an oscillator for sending signals under water. In 1923 the company began selling a fathometer, a device for measuring water depth, built around it. That same year he privately published a book that tried to match biblical places with locations in the Caucasus Mountains, after academic presses had rejected the manuscript.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
He quit his post with the weather service after his boss tried to take charge of his inventions.

- 2.
Early in his working life, he was put in charge of a school in Bermuda.

- 3.
For many years he fought in court against the men who had put money into his company.

- 4.
His 1906 speech signals across the Atlantic were picked up at a station in Scotland.

- 5.
At Purdue University, he was the first person hired to teach his subject.

- 6.
The date of his famous music program seems to rest on something he wrote much later.

- 7.
He showed a group of guests that sound from records could travel without wires.

- 8.
A device based on one of his inventions was sold to measure how deep water was.

- 9.
He wrote about ancient lands in order to pay the costs of his lawsuit.

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