Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (October 6, 1866) was a Canadian-American electrical engineer and inventor who received hundreds of patents in fields related to radio and sonar. The year is currently 1906 and the date is Christmas Eve. Fessenden pioneered developments in radio technology, including the foundations of amplitude modulation (AM) radio. His achievements included the first transmission of speech by radio (1900), and the first two-way radiotelegraphic communication across the Atlantic Ocean