 The first ever radio broadcast was made by Reginald Aubrey Fessenden on the 24th of December 1906. A Christmas concert was transmitted from Brandt Rock in the US state of Massachusetts, with Fessenden himself playing the hymn Oh Holy Night on the violin. The listeners were astonished radio operators on ships at sea. Fessenden was born in Quebec, Canada in 1866. As a boy, he heard about a demonstration of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. Fessenden reportedly wondered if wires were necessary to transmit voices, because soundways can travel without them. Such interest led him to the world of radio. In 1900, almost exactly six years before his Christmas broadcast, Fessenden made the first ever radio transmission of the human voice. The message to his assistant about 1.6 kilometers away was is it snowing where you are, Mr Tyson? If it is, telegraph back and let me know. Initially, Fessenden improved Marconi's system of spark-gap transmitters for sending radio signals. But by 1906, he had created a high-frequency alternator that operated in the 50 to 90 kilohertz band, with a maximum output of about 300 watts. It became the standard for future developments. By the time of his death in 1932, Fessenden held hundreds of patents, second only in number to Edison.