Morse Code

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.

In the spark era, wireless meant dots and dashes. A spark transmitter crashed out bursts of noise, a coherer tapped back Morse code, and that was supposed to be enough. Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor who had worked for Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, thought it was only the beginning. If a radio wave could be made steady, like a pure musical tone, instead of dying away in sparks, then a human voice might ride on it.

Long before a modern ham station, with its whisper-quiet transistors and waterfall displays, there was thunder. The earliest radio transmitters worked by discharging a capacitor across a spark gap, and every dot and dash went out into the air riding a crackling bolt of artificial lightning. That violent, beautiful noise was the heartbeat of amateur radio's first era, and it began with a young Italian experimenter who believed he could make electricity speak without wires.