All the Light We Cannot See

A dim electric bulb lit the floating mahogany-lined laboratory cabin onboard Guglielmo Marconi’s yacht the Elettra one evening in 1922 as it sailed across the rough waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Widely referred to as “the ship of miracles,” the Elettra was an impressive sight indeed. Outfitted with the most modern technologies and stretching over 200 feet long, its “regal Renaissance-style dining room” played host to kings, artists, and other luminaries in thrall of the man whose pioneering radio technology would come to define much of modern life as we know it. But for Marconi, the son of a wealthy Italian landowner and an heiress of the Jameson whiskey fortune, the Elettra was a refuge and private laboratory in which he could travel the seas conducting experiments in the electromagnetic ether, far from the disturbances of the city. What the Beagle was to Darwin, he hoped that the Elettra would be to him.

Ever since Marconi successfully sent the first transatlantic radio message in 1901—a single letter “S” broadcast from England to Canada—the public’s attention had been focused on what brave new discoveries the celebrity inventor might make. As Marconi sat straining his attention that evening in 1922, he detected a strange signal somewhere out in the sky. His equipment was receiving a radio wave of incredible length, and he struggled to make out the dits and dahs of Morse code within it. Was there a message in there? Perhaps a stray letter? Similar radio disturbances had been heard simultaneously in London and New York, and there were suggestions that they may have originated from somewhere other than the planet Earth. The press was in a frenzy over the possibility of extraterrestrial communications—did the signals come from Venus? Mars? The moon? Everyone awaited the conclusion of Marconi’s voyage to hear his answer.

This was an exciting era for new radio technologies and each day it seemed that things were changing at an ever-quicker place. Thomas Edison was conducting séances and attempting “to lure spirits from beyond the grave and trap them with instruments of incredible sensitivity.” Radio messages were coming in nightly from polar explorers flying massive zeppelin airships over the North Pole. There were fears of hypnotism by radio and suggestions that newborns could be educated by affixing radio receivers to their heads. A Mexican poet even came up with a speculative design for tiny headphones that would teach parrots to talk. As the railways of the nineteenth century collapsed people’s sense of distance by bringing far-off places closer together, the radio promised a new era of connection that might even mean the end of loneliness and isolation.

The earliest radio transmitters were noisy things called spark-gap transmitters. They were made up of two metal balls and when a Morse code key was pressed, a little bolt of lightning would spark between them, giving off the smell of ozone and sending off a torrent of interference all over the electromagnetic spectrum. The radio signals these transmitters gave off—as described in the many newspaper articles explaining this new miracle technology—were like the ripples in a calm lake after a stone is thrown in. The little crystals at the heart of radio receivers—as the analogy goes—are like little pieces of floating wood that are sent bobbing up and down as each ripple passes through the lake. This bobbing in the crystal, much like the grooves on a record moving a needle up and down, lets us tune in and hear radio waves. And while so much of this seemed new at the time, the fact is that the world has always been full of radio waves. Lightning, hydrogen atoms, echoes of the big bang all fill the air around us with electromagnetic radiation that is just beyond our perception. Change the wavelength of that radio signal and you’ll start to see light. Change it a bit more and the light goes from violet to green. Adjust it further still and it’ll go from orange to red before fading away. But just because our eyes cannot see light that’s infrared, or x-rays, or microwaves, or radio waves, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t there, just out of reach.

When Marconi and his Elettra finally arrived in New York Harbor after the transatlantic journey’s tantalizing silence, everyone was eager to know if he had made contact with life on another planet. But Marconi demurred in his interviews, saying that nothing definitive could be concluded and promising to continue his investigations. Even though the Elettra’s voyage did not provide the answers people sought, this expectant search through the nighttime static would come to be repeated by countless people countless times in the years ahead, each one hoping to find a connection somewhere over the horizon, unsure exactly where it may lead.

The Amateurs

One afternoon in 1964, Charlie Hellman (whose collection of QSL cards appears later in this book) returned home from a day’s work and sat down in front of his ham radio. If Hellman’s ham radio shack was like a typical one, he may have been in a garage or a spare bedroom. A popular ham radio magazine like QST or CQ might have been on the table beside him, pictures of the latest Hallicrafters radio equipment on its cover. Spare electrical components might have been lying around, part of an experiment to tweak an antenna tuner or some other element of the radio rig in his shack.

After flipping on the equipment, Hellman spun the dial on his receiver, visiting the usual frequencies where people hung out at that time of day. In between the whoosh of static, voices would occasionally come through alongside the dots and dashes of Morse code flickering in and out. “CQ CQ CQ Key West,” Hellman heard on one frequency; someone with a radio callsign suggesting they were based near Reno, Nevada, was broadcasting the shorthand calling any ham station in Key West to respond. Thinking little of it, Hellman continued to turn the dial. A short time later he heard a station from Key West that was trying to reach an amateur station in Detroit, apparently having just lost touch with it because of increased interference. Sitting in his house in the small village of Hastings-on-Hudson in New York, Hellman was not especially surprised to hear two stations in different parts of the country trying to reach each other. However, as Hellman continued to explore the radio frequencies, he again heard the same station from Reno trying to reach Key West, but this time there was a dreadful urgency in the man’s voice as it hissed through the radio speaker. Hellman sent out his callsign and asked the station in Reno what the trouble was. It turned out that the Reno ham radio operator had picked up an SOS signal from a ship near Key West that was on the verge of sinking, and he was desperately trying to get in touch with the Coast Guard there. Hellman jumped into action and connected the Reno station with the one in Detroit (which had previously heard a location report from the distressed vessel). Together they were able to get a rescue ship sent out to the troubled craft, saving the people on board.

While the events of this afternoon were certainly exceptional, stories of this kind helped develop the reputation that the amateur radio community wanted to cultivate about itself. The community’s numerous magazines and its leading lobbying/membership organization, the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), portrayed the typical ham as a productive member of society, someone who was “friendly,” “loyal,” “progressive,” and “patriotic” and part of “a great international fraternity” of radio operators. In the twentieth century, over a million Americans were licensed as ham radio operators, so it is difficult to say anything definitive about who the typical amateur really was. In the post-war period, ham radio thrived as a leisure activity, driven in part by the availability of deeply discounted surplus military equipment and the return of soldiers who received technical training during the war. During this period, operators were overwhelmingly white men, typically better educated than the average non-hobbyist, and more likely than not to work in a technical field. Much in the same way that hobbyists and hackers helped to develop personal computers and the Internet, amateur radio tinkerers were a driving force in the development of radio technology in the first half of the twentieth century. Magazines dedicated to the subject offered countless pages of schematics and instructions about new transmitters and many of the other components that went into making a radio function better, giving the culture a decidedly “open source” ethos. While companies like Marconi’s and later RCA and others made a killing on the commercial market, many hobbyists took a more community-focused approach.

Despite this, there was a dual aspect to how hams were perceived in post-war society. On one hand, they were “reclusive tinkerers,” the cause of television interference, and a blight on the well-manicured, newly constructed suburban landscape with their large, backyard aerial antennas. And yet, on the other hand, they were closely associated with the revolution in electronics that was taking place, and thus intertwined with the enthusiasm for a miraculous, high-tech post-war future. But at its core, much of the culture of ham radio was about people just chatting with each other. Long before the social networks of the Internet age brought strangers together, radio provided an exciting opportunity to reach beyond the confines of one’s house or hometown. “While the neighbors are turning their thoughts to nothing more cosmopolitan than washing the dinner dishes or retiring for the evening...‘hams’ are turning their dials to numbers that will bring them within speaking distance of all parts of the globe,” as one North Carolina newspaper put it. This post-war era was a time when most middle class Americans did not travel abroad for holiday, when international phone calls were extremely expensive and could not be directly dialed without an operator, and yet teenagers in their attics were soldering circuits together and talking to people across the world.

QSL Cards

The collection of QSL cards, which are the physical, postcard-sized confirmations of a far-off contact, has long been a point of pride for radio operators. Even before World War II, awards were given to operators who had “worked all zones”—meaning they had received QSLs from radio stations in all parts of the world—and the variety of different kinds of awards that could be won proliferated. Some people went to extreme lengths to collect QSL cards, like one operator in 1984 who tracked down a contact he had made 25 years previously in what was then French Equatorial Africa to ask him to send a belated QSL card from the former colony. The exchange of these cards has consistently been referred to as “one of the grandest parts of the hobby” and is seen as a kind of “final courtesy” of meeting someone new through a long-distance radio contact. With particularly strong emphasis, one writer mused that “a bond of fraternal friendship has not been sealed until we have exchanged [the] confirmation QSLs which fulfill so many of our hobby-pleasure needs.” And, while these feelings certainly reflect some of the tone of mid-century America's buoyant enthusiasm, QSL cards have continued to delight over the decades, with a commentator writing in 1990 that “no matter how blasé or jaded we may think we are, we all look forward to receiving QSL cards, especially from rare locations.”

At its most basic, a QSL card is typically a custom-designed postcard made for a specific transmitting station that prominently displays its unique call sign and has space to record the technical details of a contact, including the frequency it happened on, whether it was a voice or Morse code contact, and other items of this nature. Designs of the cards varied widely and often reflected something of the life or personality of the operator, calling to mind early Internet homepages. Sometimes the cards would feature a stylized representation of the callsign, a picture of the radio operator in his shack—perhaps with wife and children—or a postcard-style image of his town or radio equipment. Indeed, as one magazine had it: “It was a rare card from Wyoming that didn’t have a bronco buster tearing across it.”

One of the earliest mentions of a QSL card was in a 1916 editorial in QST magazine (named after another Q-Code, QST, meaning “calling all stations,” was the main publication of the ARRL). In the editorial, a radio operator in Philadelphia explains that he received an unexpected note in the mail from a fellow amateur in Buffalo, NY, letting him know that he had picked up the signal from his station. The writer was “elated” that he could be heard almost 400 miles away—much farther than he had thought possible—and issued an inaugural call to all other hams to similarly notify the owners of stations that they heard so they could provide “aid or inspiration” to their operators.

While this early confirmation of contact was sent as a letter, more of a standard emerged after World War I. Popular ham radio magazines instructed amateurs on the best practices for designing their QSL cards. Sometimes these cards were homemade. Other times they came from local printshops or through mail order providers. Because the cards were often “the only tangible evidence that remains of a pleasant or noteworthy radio contact,” there was a desire to make them “workmanlike, attractive and outstanding,” and hams were advised about trends in typography and good color combinations. However, while the QSL card was a personal reflection of the operator, it was also a technical document, so aesthetic flourishes were not to get in the way of communicating key facts about the contact. In one article from 1962, an author laments the prevalence of “QSL card failures” and then offers a vision of the ideal design: “KH6DKA’s QSL card data flows like a story…one does not have to search from back to front or otherwise for [the full station address]…he gives info on past calls held and background data on the [radio] rig used…lists Clubs and organizations with which affiliated, and amateur awards won…those who are fortunate enough to receive KH6DKA’s card get much pleasure in the story it tells and thereafter feel a closer fraternal friendship for Bill.” The author goes on to capture the vision of connection that the cards can offer, observing that “Bill’s QSL carries enough intelligence that from it alone a journalist could concoct a feature story,” adding that “it is just a case of why sell either yourself, or your over-the-air friends, short.”

When hams made a contact with someone on the air, they typically had a few options for sending a card to them. The most direct was to look up the other station’s callsign in a giant directory like the Radio Amateur Call Book and to send mail directly to the station’s address. However, the expenses associated with this became a concern. The best way to get a response would be to include a self-addressed stamped envelope for the return card. If getting return postage for an international destination was not possible, as it often wasn’t, including a few “greenstamps” (that is, one or two U.S. dollar bills) was advisable.

As the volume of cards being exchanged grew, amateur radio associations in various countries began to maintain QSL bureaus where cards could be sent before being periodically forwarded in bulk to international bureaus and then ultimately sent on to individual radio operators. For instance, in 1977 members of the ARRL could send 20 QSL cards internationally for a fee of $1/month. Typically, hams would keep postage-paid envelopes on file at the QSL bureau to get cards mailed back to them. Yet the affordable rates came at a cost: the round trip for QSLing through a bureau could take up to two years.

Even so, it was sometimes challenging to get a distant station to actually follow through and send you a QSL card. Frustration about this has been a constant theme of ham radio magazine editorials throughout the years. At the same time, not everyone has been keen on the obligations that QSLing involves. An exchange of editorials in 1974 in CQ highlights the divide. One radio operator living in the Panama Canal Zone complained of getting and sending over 1,000 QSL cards per year and called on the ham radio community to develop some way of indicating that one isn’t interested in QSLing right from the outset of a contact. But a month later, a strong rebuke came from another ham saying that it was just pure laziness to not give someone the courtesy of sending a QSL card (there were, after all, folks who would volunteer to manage the QSL correspondence for a busy station). He went on in no uncertain terms to say that “anyone who cannot do this much for his fellow amateur ought to switch to solitaire.” This debate went on for years, and in the end one commentator summed up the divide in opinions succinctly: “Those who need [because they want to fill a gap in their collection] are moved to generosity, those without are scornful.”

Over the Rainbow

On November 18, 1978, Leo Ryan, the U.S. congressman from California’s eleventh district, stood on an airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana. He had traveled there to investigate worrying reports of abuse and cult-like behavior involving constituents of his at a newly formed agricultural community belonging to the Peoples Temple in Jonestown. As he awaited the plane that would take him back following two days of on-site interviews, an ambush suddenly unfolded and the congressman and several members of his delegation were shot dead by members of the Peoples Temple. This precipitated a series of events that by the day’s end culminated in the death of more than 900 people in the nearby Jonestown compound after they consumed—voluntarily or not—cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

As the shock of this story spread, details about Albert Touchette, one of the suspected gunmen involved in Ryan’s death, came to light in the amateur radio community. Touchette was the radio station operator for the Jonestown settlement and as such was in touch with hundreds of American hams on a regular basis. Touchette acted as the primary link between the Jonestown outpost and the Temple’s headquarters in San Francisco, organizing shipments of vital supplies like diesel and building equipment, coordinating with the Temple’s U.S. legal team, and managing other operational affairs. However, he was unable to accomplish all this entirely by himself.

Long-distance radio contacts rely on bouncing signals off the Earth’s atmosphere, a feat that is easier or harder depending on the 11-year cycle of sunspot activity. At this time in the late 1970s, it was difficult to reliably establish contact between Guyana (which sits on the northern coast of South America) and California, so Touchette had to enlist other ham radio operators to help bridge the gap. Hundreds of people—mostly hams based on the East Coast of the United States, which was relatively easy to reach from Guyana—helped make thousands of connections in the years leading up to the tragedy, fulfilling requests by the Jonestown station to place collect calls to the Peoples Temple’s headquarters in California and to patch these calls through their open radio links. While these phone patches were a fairly common practice among ham operators—forming a part of the hobby’s public service mission to help military personnel abroad or members of far-flung scientific expeditions speak to their families in the United States—for some the Jonestown calls felt irregular because they concerned logistics and business operations, something that is prohibited on non-commercial ham radio bands.

In a soul-searching article published in CQ magazine in 1979, one ham offered this reflection: “Amateur radio operators traditionally have been noted for zeal and enthusiasm when it comes to helping a worthy cause...On rare occasions, however, it backfires. [The Peoples Temple] survived in the jungle with our help and prospered.” He went on: “While dozens of amateurs were complaining to the FCC about Peoples Temple activity, it seems that hundreds were actually cooperating with Temple members, although many of the amateurs knew that all of the transmissions weren't 100% legitimate. Why? Any amateur contact with Guyana had been rare before Touchette set up his station there. Some reports say that there were only half a dozen amateur stations in all of Guyana. There always seemed to be a missing stick pin on the American amateur’s wall maps. A QSL card from Guyana? ‘Wow, I need one of those’ seemed to be the attitude.”

Ham radio operators were part of a global amateur communications network that operated at the frontier where other networks didn’t, so perhaps it’s not surprising that these curious and helpful hams would get caught up in something tragic and untoward. Did the desire for a rare QSL card play a role here at all? As the author points out, “It all sounded innocent enough, a racially-mixed agricultural and medical community in the jungle of some mysterious and remote South American country.” Besides, lots of professionals should have known what was happening in Jonestown: the FCC, the press, the State Department, and even the Customs Department, which was being warned about guns being shipped out of San Francisco. But no one quite did until it was too late. And this was part of the ugly shock for the ham community. At the end of the 1970s, the ham community began to turn away from obsessive QSLing and chasing after awards and lists of new long-distance (DX) contacts. There was an emerging feeling that there was “no challenge or true prestige in working DX today as there was a few years ago.” Instead, there was a “greater interest in meaningful radio communications…the desire to truly communicate with distant lands rather than merely logging countries and exchanging QSL cards.” Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also at this time that one of the hobby magazines published the source code of a ham’s program that promised to automate the whole QSL process, printing and filling out the cards with all the efficiency of a tax department’s automated mailers. It seemed like you never knew whom you might meet on the airwaves anymore; it could even be a computer.

Across the Iron Curtain

Sometime in the 1970s a strange radio signal started to appear at 4.625 MHz. If you tuned in, as you still can today, you would hear a buzz, rhythmically repeating every few seconds against the crackle of static, sounding something like a truck horn played on an old electric organ. If you listened long enough, occasionally the buzzing would stop and a live human voice would start to read a string of numbers and letters. The effect of all of this is spooky and intriguing. The purpose of the station—known as UVB-76 in amateur communities—remains a mystery, but it is widely believed to be operated by the Russians as a way of sending secret messages to spies working undercover abroad.

From its beginnings in Marconi’s laboratory, radio has always been deeply entangled with geopolitics. During World War II, the FCC shut down amateur radio operations in the United States, fearing that amateur radio could be used either to disrupt important communications or for espionage. (Perhaps this is not totally outlandish when you consider the 1951 New York Times article written in the midst of the Korean War titled “Radio Hams in U.S. Discuss Girls, So Shelling of Seoul Is Held Up.”) In the immediate post-war period, two-thirds of all ham radio operators were based in the United States, but the Soviet Union was the second-fastest-growing region and contacts between the two countries were common. As a Time article had it in 1949: “Every week, U.S. hams casually talk to hams behind the Iron Curtain. Usually the topics discussed are politically innocuous: the weather, detailed descriptions of radio equipment, sometimes the moves in a chess or checker game.” And, the article went on, the exchange of QSL cards was also brisk: “Soviet QSL postcards, often printed in English, are government-made and attractively illustrated with monuments, public buildings, various war medals, and propagandistic puffs for Russian greats…Many Red hams add chatty notes to their cards. One QSL card arrived from Rumania bearing the casual, newsy footnote that a neighboring ham—his call letters were given—‘has just been arrested.’”

As the Cold War and its Red Scare set in more deeply, this unregulated communication across the Iron Curtain aroused more suspicion. One woman who writes in to CQ magazine in 1946 about her husband’s ham radio activities (“Is this a hobby, or is it rather, an obsession?” she asks with joking desperation) recounts how “the mail-man eyes me suspiciously as he hands me colorful post-card things scrawled with a queer jargon” and dreams that “some day I may learn to quit shuddering every time I hear the words of J. Edgar Hoover.”

The reputation of ham radio reached a low point in 1953 when Senator Riley of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, argued that ham radio “could open the way during an atomic attack for a disloyal operator to guide a Soviet plane to its target” and called for much tighter regulation. The ham radio community, however, pushed back, proclaiming that “hams are the life-blood of the electronic industrial complex” and that the hobby would help produce the scientists and engineers that would strengthen long-term national security.

At the same time, big changes were underway in the Soviet Union. From 1951 to 1956 virtually no Soviet hams were allowed to operate on the air; however, following Stalin’s death, Khrushchev implemented a series of reforms that included the resumption of amateur radio activity. In anticipation of Soviet hams coming back online, CQ in 1956 published a set of Russian-English phrases and a series of tables for establishing the location of Soviet stations. When contact finally resumed, one ham wrote that it “was like a crazy dream” when they again met someone from the Soviet Union on the air.

But who were the Soviet ham radio operators? A 1965 report from a U.S. defense establishment think tank portrayed them as largely technical professionals who worked in the electronics industry. In the USSR, ham radio was actually regulated as a sport and participation in it was actively encouraged. Free postage was given for QSL cards and, in fact, over a million of them were printed in 1956, according to one official, who also added that more than 500,000 two-way contacts across 250 countries had taken place from Soviet stations in 1957-1958 (1957 was the same year that Sputnik went into space, its radio beacon tracked by hams across the world). In many ways, the Soviet hams, who were allowed to have radio stations in their homes, were among the best-informed people in the country, able to listen to shortwave broadcasts like the BBC or VOA and to hear foreign hams chat, even if they were not so actively involved in “rag chewing” themselves.

By the early 1980s American hams spoke easily of friends in places like Bulgaria and East Germany, and a Soviet ham wrote a guest article for a popular magazine in which he reported on the state of amateur radio in the USSR. While it is a fairly anodyne piece, the author writes that there are over 100,000 operators in the country and that the country’s monthly magazine about the hobby circulates nearly a million copies. By the late 1980s, with the implementation of the USSR’s glasnost policy, Soviet hams were again chatting freely with Americans: “all of the sudden the Russians were talking…a question about personal lives would never be answered [previously, but now they are] even talking about politics most Americans would avoid.” For the first time, home QSLs were authorized—doing away with the need to go through the central QSL bureau in Moscow—and the direct exchange of personal photographs and other mementos was even allowed. At this time, according to one U.S. ham who in 1987 visited the Soviet QSL bureau (which at that time was processing over five million cards per year), Russia felt like a totally open place. After a friendly encounter with a Moscow street cop who provided directions, the American wrote that “apart from the language and everyone wearing fur hats, I reckon you could have been almost anywhere. Moscow is teeming with people and it’s quite an interesting place. I look forward to another visit to this lovely country.”

QSL Today

In early 2022 as Russia prepared to launch its military invasion of Ukraine, radio operators set their sights on the mysterious UVB-76 numbers station. Hams today often use more advanced, computer-enabled radios that allow them to see a multi-colored, flowing “waterfall” of the activity on a section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Recognizing that the Russian station was a symbol of its global military ambitions, amateurs—or pirate radio operators in this case—flooded the electromagnetic spectrum with signals so that when people went to tune in to the Russian station using one of these new “software-defined radios” they would see images of memes like the masked Anonymous figure and hear the K-pop hit “Gangnam Style” instead of the buzzer’s drone.

The sending of physical QSL cards has been on the decline recently, but the ARRL bureau still handles hundreds of thousands of them each year. As amateur radio evolves, QSL cards are increasingly being replaced with contact confirmations that are stored on shared Internet databases like the ARRL’s Logbook of the World. As an archive of twentieth-century graphic design, QSL cards present a compelling perspective on how people represented themselves and where they came from, acting in a sense like tiny flags or embassies within a global community of curious and chatty technicians. But how will they continue to develop in the decades to come? Writing on the cusp of the Internet revolution in 1995, a CQ columnist imagined that 50 years in the future QSL cards would be displaced by the next wild leap in technology: virtual reality. Instead of exchanging cards to have a physical connection with a disembodied voice met among the electromagnetic static, we would be able to “visit a foreign land and experience the environment first hand…[to] see and even touch our contact’s [radio] rig, take a look around the room, move to a window and look out at the weather.” He invites us to imagine what it will be like when, by tuning our radios, we will be able to “join an amateur sailing in the Mediterranean, hiking in the Rockies…or [to] experience the perspective of an amateur-astronaut standing on the observation deck of a future space station.” As he dreams further about what all this will mean, he hopes for a day where we can “experience a selective telepathy of sorts, communicating our conscious thoughts and emotions.” In a flourish he asks, “isn’t this the ultimate form of personal communications?” From today’s perspective, this kind of optimism about the untrammeled benefits of ever-better communication technologies may feel hopelessly outdated, but it does leave a lingering question: What is it, after all, that continues to draw us to reach out over the horizon, looking for a station to receive us?