The birth of amateur radio and radio in general was mostly associated with various amateur experimenters. There are many contenders to being the inventor of radio, that honor has been disputed between not only the original experimenters, heinrich rudolf hertz (1888),nikola tesla and guglielmo marconi, but also amos dolbear, reginald fessenden, james clerk maxwell, sir oliver lodge, mahlon loomis, nathan stubblefield and alexander popov. In the beginning of 1895, tesla was able to detect signals from the transmissions of his new york lab at west point (a distance of 50 miles). Marconi demonstrated the transmission and reception of morse code based radio signals over a distance of two or more kilometers (and up to six kilometers) on salisbury plain in england in 1896. Marconi, by 1899, sent wireless messages across the english channel , following marconi’s experiments (1900?1908) many people began experimenting with radio. Communications were made in morse code by use of spark gap transmitters.

These first operators were the pioneers of amateur radio in 1910, the amateur of australia formed the first radio society, now the wireless institute of australia. In 1912 after the rms titanic sank, the united states congress passed the radio act of 1912 which restricted private stations to wavelengths of 200 meters or shorter (1500 khz or higher) these “short wave” frequencies were genaraly considered useless at the time, and the number of radio hobbyists in the u.s. Is estimated to have dropped by as much as 88%.other countries followed suit and by 1913 the international convention for the safety of life at sea was convened and produced a treaty requiring shipboard radio stations to be manned 24 hours a day. The radio act of 1912 also marked the beginning of u.s. Federal licensing of amateur radio operators and stations. The origin of the term “ham”, as a synonym for an amateur radio operator, was a taunt by professional operators