When Hiram Percy Maxim helped found the American Radio Relay League in 1914, the word relay in its name was a promise, not a description. No single amateur station could reach very far, so messages had to hop from station to station. In the December 1916 issue of QST, Maxim put the promise to a test, asking whether a handful of operators could work up a plan to carry a message from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast and get an answer back the same night. Nobody, he wrote, had yet proved it could be done.
The league had already shown what organized relaying could do. On the night of February 21, 1916, the Washington's Birthday relay, organized by W. H. Kirwan, 9XE, of Davenport, Iowa, sent a birthday message from Colonel W. P. Nicholson of the Rock Island Arsenal out across the country. The contemporary account in The Electrical Experimenter says the message reached both coasts within an hour of leaving Davenport and was delivered to President Woodrow Wilson, to 37 governors, and to more than a hundred mayors. In Washington, W. A. Parks, 3DS, copied it direct from 8ZW in Wheeling, West Virginia, mounted his motorcycle at about two in the morning, and delivered it to the President's bodyguard at the White House.
The transcontinental attempt itself came on the night of January 4, 1917, and it failed beautifully. Maxim, at his Hartford station 1ZM, was handed a sealed envelope from the Hartford Courant holding a secret question for the Grays Harbor Washingtonian in Hoquiam, Washington, where Henry W. Blagen, 7DJ, waited at the Pacific end. A pilot message went out at 12:20 a.m., and at precisely 12:30 Maxim started the real one. It moved smartly from 1ZM to 2AGJ near Albany and on toward Mrs. Candler, 8NH, at St. Marys, Ohio, and there it stalled. Terrific static kept 8NH from reading 2AGJ, and in Chicago the trunk line manager, 9ZN, reported that it was as if someone had pulled a nonconducting blanket around the city. No return message came.
The operators refused to leave it there. Late in January, three messages from the Seefred brothers, 6EA, in Los Angeles did get all the way east, passing through Captain W. H. Smith, 9ZF, in Denver, Willis P. Corwin, 9ABD, in Jefferson City, Missouri, and 2AGJ in Albany before reaching Maxim at 1ZM in Hartford, even if the passage took two or three days. Then, in the early morning hours of February 6, 1917, everything clicked. A message left station 2PM, run by Faraon and Grinan in New York City, at 1:40 a.m., and hopped west through Alfred J. Manning, 8JZ, in Cleveland, Corwin at 9ABD, Smith at 9ZF, and the Seefred brothers at 6EA in Los Angeles. The answer was back in New York at 3:00 a.m. One hour and twenty minutes, coast to coast and back, on a regular relay route for the first time.
QST reported that transcontinental traffic soon became a regular thing over three trunk line routes, with some fifty messages already handled across the continent. The triumph came just in time. Within weeks the United States entered the First World War and amateurs were ordered off the air, their antennas taken down. But the point had been proved in the nick of time: a league of volunteers, each covering one modest hop, could span a continent. Every traffic net that still passes a message hand to hand lives in the house those winter nights built.