What changed
The founders — edited Aug 31, 2026 by Unknown editor
This is the first recorded version, so every line is shown as added. Note: Imported from content/wiki
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Amateur radio survived 1912 and came back from two wartime shutdowns because somebody organized it.
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## Hiram Percy Maxim, 1AW / W1AW
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An inventor and manufacturer — he developed the firearm silencer and worked on automobile
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engineering — Maxim was also an active amateur in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1914, frustrated that his
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station could not reach far enough on its own, he proposed a **relay league**: a network of amateur
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stations that would pass messages along, hop by hop, across the country. With **Clarence Tuska** he
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founded the **American Radio Relay League** that year.
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Maxim's callsign, **W1AW**, is now the ARRL's memorial station callsign; W1AW's code practice and
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bulletin transmissions have been on the air for generations.
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## Clarence Tuska
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Co-founder of the ARRL and the first editor of **QST**, the magazine that gave American amateurs a
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shared technical literature and a place to argue. Publishing turned out to be as important as
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relaying: it is how techniques spread before anybody could look them up.
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## The transatlantic generation
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- **Fred Schnell, 1MO** — ARRL traffic manager, and the US half of the first two-way transatlantic
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amateur contact.
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- **Léon Deloy, 8AB** — the French amateur at the other end of that contact on 27 November 1923.
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- Their work, on wavelengths the professionals had written off, proved short waves were the most
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valuable spectrum on earth.
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## The international layer
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The **International Amateur Radio Union** was founded in 1925 to represent amateurs at the treaty
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conferences where spectrum is actually allocated. Every amateur band you use exists because somebody
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argued for it in a room full of governments and commercial operators. See
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[organizations](/wiki/organizations).
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## The pattern
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None of these people were paid to do it. The service exists because volunteers built the networks,
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wrote the magazines, ran the clubs and showed up at the regulatory hearings — the same job NARA's
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[representatives](https://usnara.org/about/board) and club officers do now.
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Read next: [notable operators](/wiki/people/notable-operators).