Amateur radio in the United States gives primordal cultural significance to the founder of the ARRL, Hiram Percey Maxim. From the Wikipedia article on him, we are reminded that he CO-founded the American Radio Relay League with another bloke, Clarence Tuska. For American football fans, Mr. Tuska is figuratively the Heisman Trophy winner Quarterback drafted by the Jets but whose name was NOT Joe Namath! By the way, that no-name QB was John Huarte of Notre Dame.
Hiram Percy Maxim (September 2, 1869 – February 17, 1936) was an American radio pioneer and inventor, and co-founder (with Clarence D. Tuska) of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). Hiram Percy Maxim is credited with inventing and selling the first commercially successful firearm silencer, and also with developing mufflers for internal combustion engines.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Percy_Maxim
Mr. Maxim’s bio is summarized on the left. I did learn that he did NOT invent the Maxim Machine Gun. His father did that work but he did invent and patent the Maxim Silencer. It’s all well and good to put leaders of the amateur radio movement on a pedestal and remember their accomplishments with some reverence for what it led to today.
But it is also important for us to understand the blue collar scholars and pioneers in that movement, too. We may never know who the original ham operator was or if there was a single first op. And where was that movement birthed? It’s often said (and I did in a couple of books I wrote) that time cannot be fully understood without a consideration of space. Historians and geographers make very good bedfellows! So where in the world was Waldo…uh, the first ham operators?
We can get a firm glimpse of that by looking at FCC and ARRL records. The first publications of the newfangled radio transmitters in the early 1900s was compiled in a publication by what became known as the FCC Blue Book, a five part listing of licensed stations. Harmless, right? No, it came under fire from broadcasters themselves during the 1940s (see this link). The first Blue Book was published in 1909 and is available in various places on the Internet. The ARRL began publication of QST in 1915. Issue 1 contained a list of licensed amateurs although it is not entirely clear whether these were just members or a runny tally of who’s “on” around the U.S. (including one in Canada).
The fore-bearers of today’s 750,000 or more licensed hams in the United States are shown in this interactive map. The first FCC Blue Book in 1909 contains a small section of licensed amateur radio operators around the U.S., some 79 strong. Some were receive-only operators. A few years later when the ARRL was formed, the first issue of QST contained some 139 licensed hams.
Where were the seedbeds of early amateur radio? In the future, I may investigate how the communities from where amateur radio sprang fare in terms of licensed hams today.
I’ve taken these two original sources and created two GIS coverages — First Blue Book Hams 1909 (blue dots) and First QST Hams 1915 (red triangles) — which are placed over a base layer depicting the United States. Because of the record details, some are georeferenced to the city name while others are backward-referenced to the current location of the street address in the source. (This can be faulty as streets change, especially over a century’s time!). The fields in the Blue Book also contain the operator’s wavelength in meters and the spark length of the induction coil, usually in inches. A few listed the Kilowatts of power! The QST data contain one ham in Canada, the start of a cooperation with hams in our Northern neighbor. The additional field in that listing is only the call “letter” (sign). It’s great to see where amateur radio was launched in the United States. Maxim was born in Brooklyn NY: it and nearby New Jersey across the Hudson river may have been the locus of the movement.
Are you located near any of the originals of U.S. amateur radio? If there’s a street address, you might look that up and see what is there now. Or, you could just “Google” it in an online map. Either way, it’s exciting to visit the founding blue collar scholars who launched American ham radio even as we tend to give the cultural credit to Mr. Hiram Percy Maxim. Note that this interactive map contains both those in the 1915 QST article and the First Blue Book. See below for more details on The Lost Tribe.
You can open this interactive map in a new tab to make it easier to navigate here. A static representation is shown below. Note that this map contains both operators in the First Blue Book and those in the later 1915 QST article.
Since The Spectrum Monitor article was published in October, I’m now showing the official map of those operators listed in the First Blue Book (aka The Lost Tribe) here.
The full article in PDF can be found on the home page of this website or here. For your convenience, I’ve listed the official roster of operators published by Hugo Gernsback that I’ve called The Lost Tribe along with some characteristics from historical research (see article for details) here.
Figure2-MembersofLostTribeThe young ages of Tribe members was not shocking but the relative lack of those past their twenties was surprising. Based on those (73%) identified in historical Census archive records, here is the age distribution of The Lost Tribe members.
Much of this work involved several online resources. Each took considerable time to not only search but to read the results. Then, digesting what you’ve read is another period that simply takes time. Archival Census records, for instance, look like this:
Using genealogical research archives to supplement Census archive records was also very useful. There are several, some with free portions and commercial services, but all are highly useful. Three additional ones include the Internet Archive, World Radio History and the Hathitrust.