Inventor, Engineer. He is best remembered as a pioneer in the field of television and voice radio broadcasting. He was born Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of a judge and professor of Greek. He received his education at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and did his post-graduate studies at the Technische Hochschule (Technical University) in Berlin, Germany. While there, he became interested in alternating current phenomena after reading a book on the subject by Dr. Charles Steinmetz, who worked for General Electric (GE). He decided to emigrate to the US to meet Steinmetz and seek work with him, which he did in 1902. He had been employed at GE for only a short period of time when it received an order from Canadian-born professor and researcher Reginald Fessenden for an alternator with much higher frequency than others in existence at that time. In the summer of 1906 he presented a 50 kHz alternator that was installed in Fessenden's radio station in Brant Rock, Massachusetts. By the fall of that year, its output had been improved to 500 watts and 75 kHz. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Fessenden broadcast the first radio transmission with music and talk, playing the violin and reading the gospel himself, with the transmission being heard as far away as the Caribbean Sea. He continued to improve the alternator and also made important improvements in radio antennas, electric railroads, ship propulsion, and electric motors. On June 5, 1924 he transmitted the first facsimile message across the Atlantic Ocean. He was also instrumental in the development of television, with the first television broadcast in the US was to his home in 1927, and gave the first public demonstration of it on January 13, 1928. Over his lifetime he received 344 US patents, third only to inventors Thomas Edison and Elihu Thompson. He remained active in his later years, working as a consultant to GE and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in the 1950s. One of his later patents was in 1955 for a color television receiver that he developed for RCA. He died in Schenectady, New York at the age of 97. Among his awards and recognitions include the Medal of Honor from the Institute of Radio Engineers (1919), Knighthood in Poland (1924), The Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1944), and the Royal Danish Medal (1946). In 1983, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio and in 2002 the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.