On the evening of November 27, 1923, two American amateurs in Connecticut and a French amateur in Nice did something the experts said was impossible — and they did it with equipment most hams would now consider primitive. Fred Schnell, 1MO, and John Reinartz, 1XAM, worked Léon Deloy, 8AB, for several hours on a wavelength of about 110 meters. It was the first two-way transatlantic amateur communication, and it changed everything.
To understand why it mattered, rewind two years. In December 1921, Paul Godley heard station 1BCG in Ardrossan, Scotland, during the second transatlantic tests — one-way reception, but proof that amateur signals could cross the ocean. Reception was one thing; a real conversation was another. The 1923 contact proved amateurs could carry on an exchange across the Atlantic, in real time, on wavelengths the establishment had written off as useless for long-distance work.
That special authorization for 110 meters is worth pausing on. Amateurs in 1923 were confined to 200 meters and up — the wavelengths everyone "knew" were for short hops. A handful of experimenters had begun sneaking down to shorter wavelengths and finding astonishing results. The November 1923 contact was the proof that broke the dam: as the 1936 ARRL Handbook put it, two-way amateur communication across the Atlantic finally became an actuality, and any suspicion that it was a "freak" performance was quickly dispelled when more stations dropped to 100 meters and found they, too, could work across the ocean easily.
The exodus from the 200-meter region started immediately. Country after country came on the air, the confusion grew so great that international call-sign intermediates had to be devised, and DXing — the pursuit of distant stations as an end in itself — was born. Every DXCC award, every pileup, every beam pointed at a sunrise gray line traces back to that November night. Schnell, Reinartz, and Deloy didn't just work each other across an ocean; they worked open the door to the short waves for everyone who followed.