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