It’s hard to believe that 35 years ago this month, I got on the radio for the first time. (I was in high school, so no, I’m not that old.)
It was a Christmas Eve show, so my co-host Josh and I played lots of holiday songs.
And it all happened 84 years to the day of what may have been the very first Christmas song played over the radio.
The song, by the way, was “O Holy Night.”
It was written in France in the 1840s and became popular in the US over the next few decades.
Around that same time, in 1866, Reginald Fessenden was born in Quebec.
He would work for Thomas Edison in his twenties, and spent several years as a professor.
Then, he joined the US Weather Bureau (now the National Weather Service), where his job was to figure out weather-related uses for what was known as wireless telegraphy.
In December 1900, he used two towers set up on Maryland’s Cobb Island for a radio transmission, but this was a new kind.
Fessenden had figured out a way to make radio waves transmit actual sound rather than just the beeped dots and dashes of Morse code.
It was a huge breakthrough, one that would eventually lead to the mass media that powered so much of culture through the 20th Century and, for many of us, still does today.
Just a few years after that transmission, Fessenden was sending audio over larger and larger distances, eventually connecting a station in Massachusetts with another one all the way across the Atlantic Ocean in Scotland.
And then, on Christmas Eve 1906, it’s said that Fessenden used his technology to more or less invent holiday broadcasting.
Who said this? Fessenden did, years after the fact, so we’re pretty much taking him at his word. (Though there are plenty of people who say the evidence corroborates his account.)
Fessenden wrote that he’d told wireless users (mostly operators who were at sea) to listen in on Christmas Eve.
And when they did, he showed how if you could send a voice over wireless, you could send other kinds of sounds too.
Fessenden played a wax cylinder recording of an aria from Handel’s “Largo,” read verses from the Gospel according to Luke, and picked up his violin to play and sing “O Holy Night” before signing off with wishes for a merry Christmas.
He said later that the Massachusetts broadcast had listeners at least as far as Virginia; buoyed by the big holiday ratings, he did another program of voice and music on New Year’s Eve.
At least that’s how he remembered it, and seeing as how we’ve now had well over a hundred Decembers where people talked into microphones and played or sang Christmas music, with people listening all around them, who wouldn’t want to be the one who started it all?
If you’re into big holiday light displays, they don’t get much bigger or brighter than the ones in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn.
For decades, residents have been putting up huge light installations, sometimes with music or moving sculptures.
It’s become such a big deal that people in the neighborhood sell tickets to tourists for guided walking tours.
Hopefully, with all those lights, the locals have invested in good sleep masks.
Reginald Fessenden (National Park Service)
Dyker Heights Christmas Lights
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Photo via Wikicommons
