How Ham Radio Made Silicon Valley - by Cooper Kramer

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How Ham Radio Made Silicon Valley<br>The forgotten hobby that built America's innovation capital.

Cooper Kramer<br>Aug 07, 2026

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A teenager in Palo Alto hunches over a spark-gap transmitter. It is 1917, and on a good night he can pull in voice from an experimental station in San Jose, one of the first broadcasters on Earth, and send Morse code as far away as Phoenix. His name is Fred Terman. His radio partner is the kid next door, Herbert Hoover Jr., son of the future president. Hoover will become a mining engineer and government official. Terman will become the architect of Stanford's engineering empire and one of the people responsible for the creation of Silicon Valley. But in 1917, they’re just teenagers wasting their evenings on the radio.<br>Terman and Hoover were ham radio operators, with “ham” being slang for amateur.1 They were among the first wave of legal radio amateurs following congressional passage of the Radio Act of 1912, which allocated a range of frequencies for amateurs and introduced a license requirement for transmitting, in part due to ham radio interference during the Titanic rescue efforts. Ham radio operators may have committed the first “troll,” but that is an essay for another time.2<br>Thanks for reading Chipping In! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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This emerging hobby gave the Bay Area a network of technically ambitious young people who built for status, shared what they learned, and found jobs through one another. When an East Coast patent cartel refused to sell them the technology they needed, these hobbyists professionalized and developed their own manufacturing capabilities.<br>Long before Fairchild Semiconductor, Silicon Valley started with these kids and their vacuum tubes.<br>Radio Valley

The Bay Area of the early 1900s was known more for shipping and manufacturing than for inventing new technologies. San Francisco was one of the largest ports on the West Coast of the Americas and the region had a substantial industrial base, but it bore little resemblance to the innovation hub it is today.<br>The demands of a major port made reliable long-distance communication essential. Ships had to report their positions and coordinate arrivals while the Navy relied on wireless for fleet operations. As a result, radio became one of the region’s most important technologies. Shipping companies, the Navy, and coastal stations all needed skilled operators, creating one of the country’s largest concentrations of radio expertise.<br>Radio was the cutting-edge technology of the era, and it naturally attracted the curiosity of teenagers like Terman and Hoover. By the 1920s, the Bay Area had about 1,200 licensed amateurs, roughly a tenth of the national total, and they were extremely competitive about it.

Every successful long-distance radio contact was confirmed with a QSL card, a postcard operators mailed one another as proof they made a connection. The rarest cards, from distant countries or difficult contacts, carried enormous prestige. The cards displayed the operators’ callsigns, short alphanumeric identifiers used before and after transmitting to comply with licensing regulations. Hams obsessively collected them as they quickly became badges of technical achievement and proof of increasingly difficult contacts.<br>The competition pushed Bay Area hams to achieve many firsts in radio. In 1924, a Stanford student named Charles Litton helped the campus radio club make the first contact with Australia and New Zealand. In 1928, a tube builder named William Eitel opened up the first 10-meter transcontinental network.<br>Despite this rivalry, operators freely shared their tips and tricks at hamfests, which were tech conferences before the term existed. The Santa Clara County radio club William Eitel later chaired brought together farm boys, Stanford students, Federal technicians, and retired executives. Eitel even met his wife at one such gathering, a feat modern hams have struggled to reproduce ever since. Hamfests, radio clubs, and magazines like QST formed a distributed technical community, something like an early Hacker News combined with open-source meetups.

This dense network of technical hobbyists became one of the world’s best training grounds for radio engineers. When Federal Telegraph was founded in Palo Alto in 1909 by Stanford graduate Cyril Elwell with early backing from Stanford president David Starr Jordan, it jump-started the region’s commercial electronics industry.<br>Between 1911 and 1913, the first vacuum-tube amplifier and oscillator were developed in Federal’s Palo Alto laboratory. The company employed engineers, operators, machinists, and glassworkers, giving local amateurs somewhere to turn their home experiments into careers.<br>The Blockade

Early radio transmitters produced weak signals. To send a signal across long distances, the transmitter needed to amplify radio...