.
Marconi, Fessenden, and DeForest have their places in radio's history, but Stubblefield was the first to broadcast speech and music.
by Harvey Geller [Harvey Geller is an account executive for Billboard Publications, Inc., and the West Coast editor for Cashbox.]
-----In this photo from the Stubblefield family collection, the inventor and his son Bernard stand outside the Murray ( Ky.) farmhouse with his "raidio" apparatus. Flanking the "crazy box"-the transmitter-are the receiving device and the ball-tipped rods used with it.
MOST OF THE RESIDENTS of Calloway County, Kentucky, in the last decade of the nineteenth century must have chuckled when an inordinately eccentric young vegetable farmer suggested that he had invented a portable wireless telephone that could broadcast voice and music over high buildings and through stone walls. And they probably howled with laughter when he revealed his "crazy box," together with an odd assortment of batteries, rods, and coils.
---------- After his successful demonstrations in Washington, D.C.,
from the deck Fairmont Park in Philadelphia, Stubblefield posed with
his wife, six of their children, and his then-celebrated broadcasting gear.
In the foreground are mementos of his brief time in the limelight: photographs
of the Bartholdi on the Potomac (left) and of the crowd in Fairmont Park.
Today, eighty-odd years later, descendants of those detractors are christening radio stations, dedicating libraries, and constructing monuments in his honor. But this veneration is hardly more than local. Residents of Murray, Kentucky, may agree that Nathan Bernard Stubblefield was the first man on earth to transmit and receive the human voice without wires, but most of the world is unacquainted with his improbable name, and even his proponents are unaware of the precise date of his discovery. Evidence points to the period from 1890-92, at least seven years before Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless telegraph message across the English Channel and eight be-fore Reginald Fessenden demonstrated radio voice transmission in the U.S.
Stubblefield's name and invention are set off against Marconi's by Trumbull White in a book titled The World's Progress, published in 1902:
Of very recent success are the experiments of Marconi with wireless telegraphy, an astounding and important advance over the ordinary system of telegraphy through wires. Now comes the announcement that an American inventor, unheralded and modest, has carried out successful experiments in telephoning and is able to transmit speech for great distances without wires.... The inventor is Nathan B. Stubblefield.
He was born in Murray, Kentucky, in 1859, the son of William Jefferson and Victoria Bowman Stubblefield. In his teens he was an omnivorous student and researched everything available on the new science of electricity. He memorized long passages from Scientific American, studied the theories of James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz, and became obsessed with the more bizarre experiments of Nikola Tesla, a Croatian-American inventor who was trying to send electrical impulses through Pikes Peak.
Stubblefield was a few months shy of twenty three when he demonstrated to local residents that electricity could affect a compass needle, even though the generator and compass were yards apart. The experiment was a success, but it failed to impress his audience. By the time Alexander Bell told Tom Watson by phone, "Come here, Watson, I want you," Stubblefield was experimenting with vibrating communication devices.
In 1888 he invented a vibrating telephone, and the Murray News Weekly carried the following item: "Charlie Hamlin has his telephone in fine working order from his store to his home. It is the Nathan Stubblefield patent and is the best I have ever talked through." In 1898 he manufactured and patented an electrical storage ("earth") battery, which he later described as "the bedrock of all my scientific research in raidio [sic, his spelling]." The world's first radio message was "Hello, Rainey, hello, Rainey," according to Dr. Rainey T.
Wells, founder of Murray State College. Testifying before the Federal Communications Commission in 1947, he explained that he had personally heard Stubblefield demonstrate his wireless telephone as early as 1892:
"He had a shack about four feet square near his house from which he took an ordinary telephone receiver but entirely without wires. Handing me this, he asked me to walk some distance away and listen. I had hardly reached my post, which happened to be an apple orchard, when I heard,
'Hello, Rainey, hello, Rainey,' come booming out of the receiver. I jumped a foot and said to myself,
'This fellow is fooling me. He has wires some where.' So I moved to the side some twenty feet, but all the while he kept talking to me. I talked back, and he answered me as plainly as you please.
I urged him to patent the thing, but he refused, saying he wanted to continue his research and perfect it.
It Dr. William Mason, Stubblefield's family physician, detailed for the local newspaper a day during the same year when Stubblefield "handed me a de vice in what appeared to be a keg with a handle on it. I started walking down the lane. .. . From it I could distinctly hear his voice and a harmonica which he was broadcasting to me ... several years before Marconi made his announcement about wireless telegraphy." With the new industrial and scientific epoch at hand and the first Roosevelt in the White House, Stubblefield continued to refine his broadcasting station, a tiny workshop on the front porch of his modest farmhouse. It was barely wide enough to hold the transmitter and one chair. The transmitting mechanism was concealed in a box.
On January 1, 1902, Stubblefield staged what appears to have been the world's first public broad cast at an exhibition before a thousand spectators in the courthouse square in Murray. He established five listening stations in various sections of the town, the farthest six blocks away from the transmitter. When his fourteen-year-old son Bernard talked, whispered, whistled, and played the harmonica, he was heard, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "with remarkable distinctness." The Dispatch correspondent drove to Stubblefield's farm a few days later and was received "with the usual hospitality of Kentucky.
Previously Mr. Stubblefield had never permitted a correspondent to approach his house nearer than the road that runs before it, so jealously had he guarded the workshop in which his experiments were made." Stubblefield's son was left on the porch while Nathan and the newsman walked about five hundred yards to a dry-goods box fastened to the foot of a tree stump. The writer picked up the receiver and heard spasmodic buzzings and then: "Hello, can you hear me? Now I will count to ten. One, two, three, four...." Later Bernard whistled and played his mouth organ.
"Now," said Stubblefield, who carried several ball-tipped steel rods under his arm, "I wish you would lead the way. Go where you will, sink the rods into the ground, and listen for a telephone message." "Away we went down a wagon track," wrote the correspondent, "through a wide cornfield. A gate was opened into a lane that bordered the field and a dense oak wood. We pursued the lane for about five hundred yards and struck into the woods. I led the way. Into the heart of the woods we walked for nearly a mile. In a ravine I stopped. I took the four rods from Stubblefield. Each pair was joined by an ordinary insulated wire about thirty feet long, in the center of which was a small round telephone receiver. Two by two the rods were sunk in the ground, about half their lengths, the wires be tween them hanging loosely, and with plenty of play. I placed the receiver at each ear and waited.
In a few moments came the signaling buzz." Stubblefield's son went through the same program the newsman had heard earlier.
Later Stubblefield told the Dispatch reporter, "I have been working on this for ten or twelve years.
... This solution is not the result of an inspiration or the work of a minute. It is the climax of years.
The system can be developed until messages by voice can be sent and heard all over the country, even to Europe. The world is its limit.
"For years I have been trying to make the bare earth do the work of wires. The earth, the air, the water, all the universe as we know it, is permeated with the remarkable fluid called electricity, the most wonderful of God's gifts to the world.... The electrical fluid that permeates the earth carries the human voice, transmitted to it by any apparatus, with much more clarity and lucidity than it does over wires.
----------
The Mysterious Box
What was Stubblefield's secret? By speaking into a device similar to a telephone transmitter, Stubblefield discovered that a current carrying his voice varied in accordance with the vibrations of the transmitter's diaphragm. He also found that, in order to transmit his voice with out wires, he had to provide a radio frequency.
Its source seems to have been his "earth" battery. And his "crazy box"? To vary the amplitude of the current, he required a "modulator," apparently in that box. His receiving apparatus, in principle, consisted of two basic parts of a modern unit: a device sensitive to the transmission and a detector whose function was to translate radio-frequency waves into the low-frequency vibrations of speech. By tapping the receiving coils at different intervals, he provided a means for adjusting the inductance. He didn't perfect fine tuning, and his detector cannot be found. But he seems to have grasped the fundamental principles of radio.
-------
"Beneath the surface of the earth, as above it, there is electricity. No one knows how deep it ex tends or how high it goes. I claim for my apparatus that it will work equally as well through air and water as it does through the earth. It can be used on moving trains, it will convey messages through the land and the sea. There is no position or station where it may not be used.
"How I have obtained the result is, of course, my secret. My apparatus has not yet been patented. It is not perfect by any means. I have not yet devised a method whereby it can be used with privacy.
Wherever there is a receiving station, the signal and the message may be heard simultaneously.
Eventually I, or someone, will discover a method of tuning the transmitting and receiving instruments so that each will answer only to its mate.
"In a short time, when my improved and more powerful apparatus is finished, I will make another test and expect to be able to telephone several miles. Then I will go to Washington and patent my invention.
On January 12, 1902, the Post-Dispatch head lined a full-page story, " Kentucky Farmer Invents Wireless Telephone ... Messages Are Heard at a Mile." The article concluded, "Everyone at the receivers heard him with remarkable distinctness.
At that moment Mr. Stubblefield became a prophet with honor in his own country." Word spread quickly after the Post-Dispatch article. Stubblefield was soon besieged by capitalists, financiers, stock-jugglers, hucksters, and hawkers. Dr. Mason recalled seeing a $40,000 check for a part interest in the invention, and titans of industry, "wearing diamonds as large as your thumb,' scuttling up dusty roads to Stubblefield's farm. "You and I will yet add luster to the Stubblefield name," wrote Nathan to his cousin Vernon.
Yet initially he refused all propositions, including one for half a million dollars. "It is worth twice that," he insisted, entrusting only his son Bernard with the secret of his mysterious keg. On occasion he repulsed over-inquisitive visitors with a shot gun.
Invited by leading scientists, Stubblefield traveled to Washington, D.C., with a trunk containing all of his papers associated with the invention, to demonstrate the practicability of his contrivance from the steamship Bartholdi on the Potomac to crowds along the riverbank. On Decoration Day, 1902, he broadcast words and music from the Belmont Mansion and Fairmont Park in Philadelphia to hundreds of statesmen, investors, scientists, and newsmen. Articles appeared in major newspapers throughout the world acclaiming him as the distinguished inventor of the wireless telephone and a celebrated scientific genius. At least one extravagant reporter credited Stubblefield with "the world's greatest invention." But the inventor was destined not to enjoy the fruits of his ingenuity.
The crucial blow was unquestionably the loss of his trunk, apparently en route from Philadelphia to Murray. "Will I ever see my trunk again?" Stubblefield scribbled on the back of a map after he returned from Philadelphia. Vernon Stubblefield claimed the trunk was stolen. James L. Johnson, executive secretary of Murray's Chamber of Commerce, asserts, "There's no way to tell where that trunk went, but many of its papers later showed up as part of the Collins Wireless Corporation of Canada patents. Frederick Collins, who formed that corporation, was one of the scientists who attended the Fairmont Park demonstration." Johnson also points out that Stubblefield was inveigled into a partnership in a fraudulent firm, the Wireless Telephone Company of America, based in New York: "Needing money to pursue and perfect the invention, he traded all his interests, all his secrets, all his equipment for 500,000 shares of stock in the company. . . . On May 14, 1903, Stubblefield discovered that his 500,000 shares had been juggled so that the books read his shares were 50,000. He protested in a strong letter to the firm, and rather than let the information be revealed to the public the company called it a typographical error and issued him a certificate for the original amount. But the stock was worthless, in any case." Depressed and disillusioned, Stubblefield grew more and more eccentric. He was virulent about those who had fleeced him and advised friends to withdraw any investment they had in his project.
Soon after this incident, he renounced his wife, nine children, and all other family and built a hermit's hut in Almo, six miles from his family farm house. (Bernard later joined the Westinghouse Electrical Corporation, one of the pioneer commercial radio firms. Did he utilize his father's secrets in the production of early crystal sets?) In 1908, Stubblefield finally obtained patents on his inventions in the U.S., Canada, and England, but the world took no notice. In 1906, Fessenden had demonstrated transmission of voice and mu sic (including his own violin solo) by the continuous-wave method from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, and it had been picked up as far away as the coast of Virginia. The field was dominated by other men, and Stubblefield seems to have taken no further initiatives. He lived alone for the next twenty years. His farmhouse, which had been lost to creditors, mysteriously burned to the ground.
Wireless lights were reported in trees and along fences guarding Stubblefield's crudely constructed shanty, and his neighbors said that voices, apparently coming from the air, were heard by trespassers. "Get your mule out of my cornfield," Stubblefield's voice could be heard shouting in the night. He curtly refused the aid of former friends.
"He was never insane," they insisted, "only peculiar." A friend found Stubblefield's body in his hut on March 30, 1928, several days after his death, his brain partly eaten by rats. Death was caused by starvation, Dr. Mason concluded. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Bowman's Cemetery, a mile and a half from Murray.
In 1930 a memorial to "the first man to transmit and receive the human voice without wires" was dedicated at Murray State Teachers College campus, less than five hundred feet from the re mains of the world's first "broadcasting station." That same year Stubblefield's family brought suit in New York's Supreme Court for recognition and patent rights. The court ruled that they had proved every detail of their claims but that the statute of limitations had made those rights "void as to royalties." On May 18, 1961, the Kentucky Broadcasters Association granted Nathan Stubblefield official recognition as the inventor of radio. In 1962 his tragic life was dramatized in a folk opera, The Stubblefield Story, composed by Murray State professor Paul Shahan and Mrs. Lillian Lowry and performed in the campus auditorium. It was staged again as part of the 1976 Bicentennial.
Murray's only radio station, a 1,000-watt outlet, programs "middle of the road and some rock as well," according to program director Fransuelle Cole. Between Jesse Winchester's "Seems like Only Yesterday" and a live spot for Kroger's Grocery, one hears, "You are tuned to WNBS, 1340 on your radio dial in Murray, Kentucky, the birth place of broadcasting." The station's call letters, not incidentally, include Stubblefield's initials.
-------- Among those who were present in Philadelphia's Fairmont Park
on May 30, 1902, to hear Stubblefield's wireless telephone demonstration
were Frederick Collins (identified by an anonymous hand, perhaps the
inventor's, with the number 2) and Henry Clay Fish (3). One close student
of Stubblefield's fortunes suggests that Collins stole the trunk containing
details of the invention; Fish was treasurer of the Wireless Telephone Company
of America, which tried to swindle the inventor. Stubblefield is at the far
right (6).