1900: Canadian makes first wireless radio transmission 

It was a festive first broadcast. The date was Christmas Eve 1906 and Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian inventor born in Quebec, sang hymns in an early wireless radio transmission. He broadcast from Massachusetts to Scotland and sang O Holy Night, Handel's Largo and Adore and Be Still. But Fessenden said because he had to muster up his singing voice, he opted for a re-broadcast on New Year's Eve. When it came to doing it a second time, he didn't do the singing. But these holiday broadcasts were not the first time Fessenden transmitted a voice electronically. The inventor originally sent a radio transmission six years earlier. On Dec. 23, 1900, Fessenden transmitted a broadcast by wireless telegraph between two towers on a site near Washington, D.C. His contemporary, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, claimed to have sent an even earlier wireless telegraph in 1895. In this television clip, CBC debates whether it was Canada's Fessenden or the Italian Marconi who invented radio transmission.