Amatuer Radio During World War One

There is person is all alone in the middle of the ocean. Hundreds of miles from anyone else, in a boat that is sinking. They are most likely going to die, but they don’t. They were able to contact help using an amateur radio. This is one of the many examples of how amatuer radio has saved lives. In war, one ship would be sinking and would be able to contact another and be able to save most or all the crew before the doomed ship went under. Amateur radio was very instrumental in World War I.

Before World War I amatuer radio wasn’t taken very seriously. this was in Britain “The Post Office had issued about 5,000 licences for radio before the war, though the system might charitably be described as a revenue-raising device, so little did the Post

“Congress approved the Radio Act of 1912, which required amateurs to be licensed and restricted to the single wavelength of 200 meters. In 1914 the American Radio Relay League was founded by Hiram Percy Maxim”(ARRL). Only a few years later the United States entered World War I. “When the United States went into the War, The military forces were faced with an absolute lack of the great corps of radio officers, instructors, and operators that was needed. That need was great, and it was ugent. There was no time to train men. Probably no more fortuitous circumstance has ever occurred in history than the fact that at the time these thousands of trained radio men were so badly needed, there were over six thousand amateurs in this country who had been training themselves for periods as long as fifteen years in just the sort of activity for the which they were required”(DeSoto, 51-52). Through this time of trying to recruit as many amatuer operators as posible they were able to get thousands. “The total number of Navy radiomen was increased from 979 on January 31, 1917, to a total of about 6700 at the time of Armistice”(DeSoto, 52). These operators were very useful in the war effort, but outside of the military use, the use of radios were