Every April 18, radio amateurs worldwide take to the airwaves in celebration of World Amateur Radio Day. It was on that day in 1925 that the International Amateur Radio Union was formed in Paris.

Amateur Radio experimenters were the first to discover that the short wave spectrum — far from being a wasteland — could support worldwide propagation. Amateur Radio pioneers met in Paris in 1925 and created the IARU to support Amateur Radio worldwide.

Since then the IARU has worked tirelessly to broaden the range of bandwidths available to radio fans. Interest in Amateur Radio has only grown since those early days, with over 3,000,000 licensed operators spreading their voices across the globe today. It’s through this medium that people from different nations and cultures were able to spread ideas with great speed, long before the ability to shoot off an email or video chat was ever possible.

IARU has events all over the world to celebrate this great invention and to bring together people who still find value in being able to skip a radio across the ionosphere over thousands of miles and bring together two sides of the globe through little more than an oscillating wave of energy.