In the spring of 1914, Hartford, Connecticut, had two very different radio men with the same idea. Hiram Percy Maxim was a well-known inventor in his forties, a graduate of MIT and the son of the inventor of the Maxim gun. Clarence D. Tuska was not yet twenty, the secretary of the Radio Club of Hartford and already an ardent experimenter. Together, in May 1914, they founded the American Radio Relay League, with Maxim as president and Tuska as secretary, to do one practical thing: pass messages farther than any single amateur station could reach on its own.
The need was real. Under the Radio Act of 1912, most amateurs were confined to a wavelength of 200 meters, which limited a typical station to roughly 25 miles. A message that needed to travel farther had to be handed, station to station, through a relay. The idea caught quickly. By September 1914 the League had more than 230 stations on its roster, and by March 1915 it had about 600. In February 1915 the ARRL split from the Hartford club and incorporated on its own under Connecticut law.
Growth brought a new problem: how would a league scattered across a continent stay in touch with itself? Tuska suggested the answer, and then built it himself. He founded a magazine, prepared at his mother's house, and became its first editor. Maxim and Tuska personally financed the venture, and in December 1915 the first issue of QST reached members free of charge. It was just 16 pages, with further issues offered by subscription at one dollar a year. The name was chosen from the Q signals: QST meant calling all stations, a fitting title for a journal meant to call a scattered hobby together.
QST quickly became the glue of the young League. It carried the official lists of relay stations, shared technical advice for building better transmitters and receivers, and gave amateurs in distant towns a sense of belonging to the same national effort. The relays themselves were maturing, too. In 1916 Maxim organized six trunk lines of relay stations running east to west and north to south, and in February 1917 a message sent from New York to Los Angeles received an answer in one hour and twenty minutes, a remarkable feat for the day.
Maxim remained president of the ARRL until his death on February 17, 1936, after 22 years in the role. His call sign, 1AW and later W1AW, did not retire with him. On September 2, 1938, the Hiram Percy Maxim Memorial Station, W1AW, was dedicated in Newington, Connecticut, and it still sends bulletins and code practice from that site today. QST, meanwhile, has been published since it resumed in May 1919 after a wartime pause. Every issue that still arrives each month traces back to a teenager in Hartford who thought a relay league needed a voice, and then sat down at his mother's house and gave it one.