History of Ham Radio

 Amateur radio came into being after radio  waves (proved to exist by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz in 1888) were adapted  into a communication system in the 1890s by the Italian inventor  Guglielmo Marconi. ... Following Marconi's success many people began  experimenting with this new form of "wireless telegraphy". 

 In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell presented his theory of the electromagnetic  field. In 1901 Guglielmo Marconi communicated across the Atlantic with a  radio device using high power and giant antennas. To curb interference,  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.

 Guglielmo Marconi who, at age twenty-two, first brought together the  individual inventions of several others to produce a practical  communications system in 1896. That year, using a Hertz oscillator as a  transmitter, a tube filled with metal filings called a coherer as a  receiver, and aerials on both, he demonstrated his system by sending a  message wirelessly over two miles of English countryside, and  immediately applied for a patent. As described by DeSoto.