Today: Headlines from April 18, 1925

Looking Back 100 Years

Pull up a chair, tune your dial, and let’s spin back exactly one century to a crisp spring Saturday—18 April 1925. While the Roaring Twenties were in full swing, a small band of wired-up visionaries gathered in Paris to make sure ordinary people could keep talking across the airwaves. Their quiet conference would echo into everything from emergency communications to today’s Wi-Fi-enabled smart fridge.

1) Paris, France | The Birth of the International Amateur Radio Union

[STORY_1_IMAGE]

In a side room of the Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, 25 national radio societies—fresh-faced experimenters from the United States, Argentina, Japan, Egypt, and beyond—adopted a single motion: to defend and promote “the amateur’s right to the ether.”

• Why it mattered in 1925 – The commercial stations boomed, naval services bristled, and governments were starting to fence off frequencies. Amateurs, already relegated above 200 meters (≈1.5 MHz), feared being squeezed into static. Hiram Percy Maxim (ARRL co-founder) urged delegates to unite before international regulators met later that year. By day’s end the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) was born, committee ink still drying on its first charter.
• Immediate ripple – A common lobbying voice meant hams kept slices of short-wave spectrum. Those bands became lifelines after disasters like the 1935 Cuba hurricane and the 2004 tsunami—moments when amateur rigs out-talked broken phone lines.

2025 Lens

Fast-forward to our Bluetooth earbuds and Starlink constellations, and it’s easy to overlook the volunteer spirit holding the 21-century “maker” culture together. Yet the IARU still represents three million licensed amateurs and stewards things as unglamorous (and crucial) as interference standards—a reminder that innovation often begins in basements, not boardrooms.

What Else Was Happening?

Truth be told, 18 April 1925 was a news lull sandwiched between Gatsby’s publication (10 April) and Hindenburg’s election (26 April). But in that lull, hobbyists quietly secured the future of global communication—proof that some of history’s biggest ripples start with the softest sound.