1906 marks the 100th anniversary of Reginald Fessenden’s voice radio transmission across the Atlantic, the first voice transmission by radio (Marconi only sent Morse code). He sent his message from Brant Rock, Massachusetts (my wife’s hometown), which will be having a gala celebration and reenactment of the moment in December.
To that end, I thought it fitting to explore some web sites devoted to Fessenden and his achievements as a radio pioneer. I looked at http://www.radiocom.net/Fessenden/, “Reginald Aubrey Fessenden web page”, created by “ raf.nesco, Box 686
Brant Rock, Massachusetts 02020.
This is a good example of an enthusiast web site, put together by an amateur historian. It is replete with links to other sites (whether for a single picture or passage, or more in-depth information). It does offer an encapsulated account of Fessenden’s life, with occasional links embeddeed in the text. There is no “multimedia” aspect to the site, in terms of animations, sound files, etc. There are many color images of vintage postcards, along with black and white photos which enlarge when you click on them.
As far as layout, there is no real order to things; this is one of those sites where you just “jump in.” As you scroll down, you come across segments of links to other sites, then the narrative of Fessenden’s life, then a cluster of more links.
Viewing the source code doesn’t seem to indicate that a CSS was used; there are the standard /p tags, along with dropped-in URLs. As far as a database backend, I don’t know how to look for that. The code indicates that Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 and Meta Tag Builder were used.
All in all, this is not a sophisticated site, but is chock-full of useful links and images, and serves capably as a gateway for further online exploration of Fessenden’s life.
