Duncan Fisher, Telford College

The teenage telegraph network in Mount Vernon, New York, that ran from 1903 to 1907, was a straightforward example of an online community brought together for a clear reason.  In this case it was socialization.  There were dozens like it across the country, and had been since at least the 1880s.  Some of them were for fun, and others were for some form of public service.  At the Mount Vernon club’s nucleus, however, young wireless experimenter Irving Vermilya was also busy with a pirate radio station, almost certainly the country’s first.  In this self-taught role he interfaced in time with an altogether new community of other amateurs, who collectively interfaced outside their community with large and important commercial and government institutions.  The presence of these youngsters on the air rankled, but in an improvised partnership with these institutions the amateurs helped invent the very art of wireless.  So well did they do this that many of them matriculated into the mainstream of the profession and became important players themselves.  Little is known about these very early amateurs and exactly how they functioned with business and government at the dawn of radio, but the story of Irving Vermilya and his radio and telegraph friends suggests that it was a very complex story indeed, a dense interweave of themes of community, information-sharing, mission, and opportunity.  Strikingly, these themes foreshadowed much of the interplay between amateur hackers and the computer industry 70 years later.