Historical perspective

I had some time on my hands. Couldn't sleep, band condx terrible, didn't feel like working on reading any one of my unfinished books or a radio project, and internet seemed boring. So I just played some mind games with the course of history until I finally dozed off...

I was first licensed in 1959. If the day I took my Novice exam had been the day the Civil War ended, the US would just now be entering WWI.

I have often wondered if any Civil War veteran ever became a licensed ham.

Hams first began to experiment with voice transmission around 1920, AM of course. Hams used AM for about 22 years before the WWII shut-down, and for another 20 years or so between the end of the War and when AM was declared "dead", circa 1965. AM reigned king for a total of about 42 years before its announced death. AM began to "come back" around 1971 or 1972, when a bunch of young guys ("hippies" to the old buzzards of the day), mostly in the northeast, became active on AM. AM activity has been increasing ever since. AM was "dead" for only about 7 years, and has been "coming back" now for 40 years or more - much longer than it ever was supposed to be dead to begin with, and for almost as many years as it had been in use by hams from the beginning until mainstream amateur radio declared its death.

The Napoleonic wars, from the first decade of the 1800s led to widespread unrest in Europe throughout the first half of the 19th Century, which reached a boiling point in about 1848, whose consequences led to the unification of Germany and Italy in the second half of the century. This led to the France-Prussian war in 1870, which set the stage for WWI. WWI set the stage for WWII; in fact it was a continuation of the same conflict, with an uneasy 20-year truce from 1918 through 1938. So-called "settlements" of certain issues at the end of WWII ushered in the Cold War, which ended in 1990. The current situation in the Middle East is a direct consequence of alliances that developed during the Cold War, as well as conditions generated by the two world wars.

The crap that is going on in the world to-day is nothing new, merely the latest manifestation of a series of events that have been evolving for centuries.