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The alternator rotor spun itself to pieces — and sent music down the coast

The alternator rotor spun itself to pieces — and sent music down the coast

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The alternator rotor spun itself to pieces — and sent music down the coast

In a sandbagged bunker on the Massachusetts coast, a Swedish immigrant barely out of his twenties watched a steel rotor accelerate toward speeds his own family believed would tear it apart. The machine had never been tried before: an alternator meant to generate a continuous electrical wave, something no spark-gap transmitter could produce. When it was finally switched on and wired to a violin, would the signal reach anyone at all — and would the rotor survive its own operation?

In this episode, we trace the career of engineer Ernst Alexanderson from that bunker in 1906 through seven decades of patents, broadcasts, and one desperate personal use of his own invention, asking what it costs a man who has built his life on the certainty that a signal will reach its destination to send one and simply have to wait.

Person: Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson
Location: Brant Rock, Massachusetts
Date: December 24, 1906
Case: the Alexanderson alternator, the first machine to generate continuous radio-frequency alternating current
Status: alternator preserved and still operational at Grimeton, Sweden; Alexanderson died in 1975

- Born January 25, 1878, in Uppsala, Sweden; studied at Lund, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and the Technische Hochschule in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1902
- Commissioned by researcher Reginald Fessenden, Alexanderson built the alternator installed at Fessenden's Brant Rock station in summer 1906, reaching 500 watts at 75 kilohertz by autumn
- On Christmas Eve 1906, Fessenden's violin broadcast reached Navy and shore-station radio operators along the East Coast
- In 1923, Alexanderson's son Verner was kidnapped; Alexanderson broadcast a radio appeal and the boy was found three days later
- Alexanderson filed 345 U.S. patents over his lifetime, the last submitted in 1968 at age 90; he died May 14, 1975, at 97, and is buried at Vale Cemetery in Schenectady, New York
- The only surviving working Alexanderson alternator stands at the Grimeton radio station in Sweden, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004

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