Federal Telegraph Company
American radio communications company
The Federal Telegraph Company was a United States manufacturing and communications company that played a pivotal role in the 20th century in the development of radio communications. Initially focused on transmitting voice wirelessly, the focus of the company shifted to competing with existing telegraph operators such as Western Union. The company would later mature into a Government contractor working closely with the United States Navy.
History
The company was founded in Palo Alto, California in 1909 by Cyril Frank Elwell, and was first known as the Poulsen Wireless Company, after licensing Valdemar Poulsen's arc transmitter for use in the United States. The company initially developed high-powered transmitters used for long distance radiotelegraph communication. In 1911–13, Lee De Forest and two assistants worked at Federal Telegraph on the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator, which De Forest called the "Oscillaton" after his earlier Audion.
In 1912 the US Congress appropriated $1 million to build a chain of radio stations for the United States Navy. Elwell held discussions with naval officials and it was decided that a demonstration would be carried out at the new naval station in Arlington, Virginia. This demonstration involved using Federal equipment to exchange messages from Arlington to the US battleship USS Arkansas as it traveled on its shakedown cruise to the Canal zone. Further testing included transmissions from Arlington to Federal's station in Honolulu which was a then record breaking transmission of over 4,500 miles.
The public source identifies “Federal Telegraph Company” as american radio communications company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Federal, Telegraph and Company.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5440457. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1909, 1911 and 1912.
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This entry incorporates text from “Federal Telegraph Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.