Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

Communication by wire had come to the Peninsula in 1853, when California State Telegraph lines were strung from San Francisco to San Jose, then east to Stockton, Sacramento and Marysville. Completion of the San Francisco-San Jose rail line a decade later added stations and Morse Code operators at depots.

Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876 rang a San Jose harmonic in 1880 when the Sunset Telephone Company was organized there. Telephone service grew slowly until almost the turn of the century, then spurted.

Wireless telephony was in the wind as Stanford University opened in 1891. In 1888, Heinrich Hertz had demonstrated that James Clerk Maxwell's predictions concerning electromagnetic waves were correct, at least for short distances. The press reported Hertz's experiments and those of Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian physicist working in England, who in 1898 broadcast a Morse Code signal across the English Channel. Reading of this and witnessing experiments by his Stanford physics professor, a science-minded student from San Jose named Charles David Herrold repeated Marconi's tests in his home laboratory. He managed to send signals over a distance of one mile.

A few years later, the San Francisco Call used wireless to flash the news that a troop ship bringing American soldiers home from Manila was near the Golden Gate. Soon military networks were being linked up.

When Marconi sent a dot-dot-dot signal (the Morse letter S) across the Atlantic in 1901, his feat was widely reported. At Stanford, it stirred keen interest among the professors -- and their sons. "Wireless" experiments required no complex equipment -- a cylindrical Quaker Oats box wound with copper wire, a crystal and a "cat's whisker" wire were about all it took to tune in.

Meanwhile, inventors were aiming to improve Marconi's transmitting system. In San Francisco, Francis McCarty, 17, son of Leland Stanford's head coachman, began to develop a promising damped-wave method. But in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, the youth was killed by a runaway horse. Two investors, the Henshaw brothers of Oakland, asked Professor Ryan at Stanford to name someone to continue McCarty's work. Ryan turned to Cyril Elwell, a recent engineering graduate who had succeeded in developing electric smelting techniques.

Elwell set up shop in Palo Alto, where radio had gained a toehold. Douglas Perham had built the first radio spark transmitter in town in 1906, and later moved it to his house and machine shop at 913 Emerson Street. Three amateurs were active locally: James Arthur Miller, who in 1907 had built a 75-foot antenna mast and set up the first radio station in town, and two professor's sons, Daddy Marx's boy Roland and George Branner. Elwell bought a house at 1451 Cowper Street and put up two 75-foot wooden masts. Turning the bungalow into a wireless telephone station, he broadcast a wavering version of "The Blue Danube" to stations about five miles away in Los Altos and Mountain View.

After testing the McCarty system for a year, Elwell concluded that it was inadequate -- only continuous waves (C.W.) would serve the need he saw for reliable commercial wireless transmissions that could compete with cable companies for lucrative traffic. Knowing Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen had produced C.W. with an arc converter, Elwell telegraphed Poulsen asking how much he wanted for U.S. rights. The price proved too steep; the Henshaws withdrew from the project and Elwell bought their equipment for $250. Then he sailed to Denmark and made a deal with Poulsen. Returning with a small arc converter he bought, Elwell failed to elicit backing in New York, where promoters of Marconi's system and others had given wireless a bad reputation. Back in Palo Alto, Stanford President Jordan offered to invest $500, and with that as a cachet, Elwell enrolled other faculty members -- particularly Professor Marx -- as investors in the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, founded in 1909.

Elwell bought Perham's house and shop in 1910. It served as the apparatus factory for what, in 1911, became Federal Telegraph Company. The company demonstrated 50-mile, two-way C.W. communication between Sacramento and Stockton. Next came a 2,100-mile transmission to Honolulu, using 300-foot masts designed by Professor Wing. Then the company built a U.S. network of 16 high-power wireless stations, and in 1912 opened a San Francisco-Hawaii commercial wireless route.

The arcs enabled Federal to focus signals in a narrow band, unlike the older systems, but they needed continuous improvement. Lee de Forest, who in 1906 had invented a three-element vacuum tube he called the audion, asked for a job in 1911 and Elwell made him research director. Technician Charles Logwood and telephone engineer Herbert Van Etten were added to form a radio research team. Besides improving C.W. and the arcs, the trio experimented with de Forest's audions, which had only been applied as a wireless signal detector. Cascading a series of tubes, they developed the first genuine amplifier, showing how it could make a fly's steps on a sheet of paper sound like an army's marching boots, and airing voices 2 1/2 blocks from the lab.

The team also noted "squeals and howls" in a repeater circuit -- signs of feedback that could create a self-regenerating oscillation. Decades later the U.S. Supreme Court awarded the feedback invention patent to de Forest, based on the lab notes. The audion, after improvement in the East, became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems until the invention of the transistor in 1947.

About the time Elwell was airing "The Blue Danube" in 1909, Charles D. Herrold, by 1909 nicknamed "Doc" because he headed a college in San Jose for training engineers and telegraphers, broadcast voice and music from "San Jose Calling," a station he first identified as FN. Herrold used an arc transmitter of his own design. In 1912 Herrold began regularly scheduled broadcasts -- apparently America's first. His station later became KQW and then KCBS. Among his listeners in 1914 was a Stanford faculty member's son, Fred Terman, who with future U.S. president Herbert Hoover Jr. had built a spark set.

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