One night in April 1914, Hiram Percy Maxim sat down at his one-kilowatt station in Hartford, Connecticut — call sign 1WH, one of the best-equipped amateur stations in New England — and tried to send a message to a fellow ham in Springfield, Massachusetts, just 30 miles away. Nothing came back. He called again. Still nothing. Then he remembered a ham he knew in Windsor Locks, roughly halfway between the two cities, and asked him to carry the message the rest of the way. It worked, of course — a human relay, one link at a time — and as the dots and dashes crackled through the spark-gap static, Maxim found himself wondering why such relays were left to chance.
Maxim, then 44, was no ordinary experimenter. The son of Hiram Stevens Maxim, the machine-gun inventor, he had graduated from MIT at sixteen and made his own name with the Maxim Silencer, the first commercially successful firearm silencer, alongside mufflers for early automobiles. But amateur radio had captured him completely. The amateurs of 1914 labored under the Radio Act of 1912, which had pushed them to short wavelengths and short ranges, and a message that could not cross 30 miles on a good night was the rule rather than the exception. Maxim saw the answer not in bigger transmitters but in organization: a national league of stations, each one ready to relay for the next, so a message could hop from Hartford to San Francisco the way his had hopped to Springfield.
He carried the idea to the Radio Club of Hartford that same month, and the club agreed to sponsor it. Then Maxim and the club's young secretary, Clarence D. Tuska, drafted an application form explaining the purpose of the American Radio Relay League and mailed it to every amateur station they could think of. The response astonished them: by September 1914, more than 230 stations had signed the roster. By March 1915 there were 600, and in February of that year the fledgling organization split from the Radio Club of Hartford to incorporate under Connecticut law. The money was shaky — the League lived on the sale of booklets, maps, and message blanks — but the idea was sound, and the stations kept coming.
Keeping a continental relay league in touch with itself demanded a voice of its own, so Maxim and Tuska personally financed a bulletin. The first 16-page issue of QST went out free to every member in December 1915, prepared in Tuska's mother's house, and it has been published continuously ever since, through every era of amateur radio, except for a short hiatus during World War I when the government shut amateurs down entirely.
Maxim served as ARRL president for 22 years, until his death on February 17, 1936. A year later the League's memorial station took the air under his own call sign, W1AW, and it still broadcasts from ARRL headquarters in Newington, Connecticut — daily bulletins, code practice, and the voice of the League he founded. His rotary spark-gap transmitter, "Old Betsy," holds a place of honor at headquarters, and the annual Hiram Percy Maxim Award honors an amateur under twenty-one, a reminder that the League was born from one simple conviction: no station is ever really alone when the next one answers.