[GreenKeys] NPR: Amateur Radio is growing...

[Jim Haynes]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010, Don Robert House wrote:

> I still have not figured out where HAM came from...
>
There are several competing theories, one involving a magazine named
Home Amateur Mechanic, one involving three guys at Harvard whose
initials were H. A. and M. and who used that as a call sign, and one
that it is a Cockney pronunciation of "hamateur".

The one that is most credible to me is the following.  It is well
established that in the days of wire-line Morse telegraphy the beginner
and less skilled operators were called "hams" or "plugs".  Now the
origin of this I don't know, but perhaps ham came from "ham fisted"
since a ham-fisted guy would be a poor Morse operator.  And there is
a story, perhaps by Mark Twain, about an inferior horse that was
called a "plug".  There were a bunch of commercial trade schools that
turned out these operators; they were called "ham factories".

Now when wireless was first getting started of course a source of
professional operators was the always excessive pool of wire line
Morse operators.  And things were pretty wild and wooly in those days;
amateurs regularly interfered with the commercial/government operators,
taunted them, sassed them, etc.  So it is highly plausible that the
pro operators would complain about those lousy hams causing all the
trouble.

Now speaking of "amateur" a scholar noted that the Latin root word
"amat" means love.  So an amateur is someone who does what he does
for the love of it.  And the scholar went on to say, "the professional
may be a dud, but to get any recognition the amateur has to be good."