Eugenia Farrar

Eugenia Farrar, the first person ever to sing on the radio, in 1907, died in 1966 at the age of 93.

Her final engagement came more than 100 years after her song was famously heard in the borough. On an October day in 1907 — the exact date has been forgotten — the Swedish opera singer, born Ada Eugenia von Böös, sang the then-popular parlor song I Love You Truly into a radio apparatus in the Midtown laboratory of Dr. Lee De Forest.

''Well, here goes something into nothing,'' she said before she began, according to ''The Airwaves of New York'' (McFarland and Company, 1998).

It turned out that someone was listening. Ben Gross, the longtime radio editor of The Daily News, reported that she had not sung more than a few notes when a wireless operator at the Navy Yard jumped. ''I hear a woman singing!'' he told his lieutenant, who grabbed the headphones - nytimes.com

The lieutenant, Mr. Gross wrote, was ''fearful of the enlisted man's sanity.'' But he, too, heard Mrs. Farrar. Perhaps he also heard Lee De Forest, the radio pioneer whose laboratory was the scene of the performance, shout, ''Encore!'' Perhaps the lieutenant heard Mrs. Farrar sing a second song, ''Just a-Wearying for You.'' Or perhaps not. It is known that the lieutenant grabbed a telephone and called The New York Herald. ''His call was transferred to a rewrite man,'' Mr. Gross wrote in his 1954 book ''I Looked and I Listened.'' The reporter was ''convinced that the newspaper was the target of a practical joker,'' Mr. Gross wrote, and ''called back a few minutes later to check on the authenticity of the information.'' ''The rewrite man dashed off a brief story which was buried on page 5 of next morning's Herald,'' he wrote. ''One of the most significant developments of modern times was given the treatment usually accorded an item of no more importance than a street-corner brawl.''