The wireless navy arrived with the twentieth century. Navies around the world provided much of the leadership for the invention, adoption and use of HF radio communication. 

When the Great War started, more than 3000 ships – about 10% of total tonnage – used wireless telegraphy. For more than ten years, the radio industry had focused on ships at sea as the primary professional customer. Most radios in use were manufactured by Marconi and Telefunken.

Before the war, companies like Marconi provided wireless communication as a service. They manufactured the equipment, installed and maintained it on ships and provided radio operators. Shipping companies just rented the service. During the war, the company trained thousands of radio operators for W/T or wireless telegraphy in the navy and merchant marine.

Wireless navy communications used spark transmitters on eight different frequencies in the low and medium wave bands. Early spark transmitters were very strong and broad. A single signal could spread out over most of the available frequencies. Lots of interference, no stealth. During the course of the war, advances in vacuum tubes led to the use of single frequency oscillators that concentrated signals on narrow bands. Thus, WWI radio moved from spark, to arc, to modern transmitters.

Aside from the obvious importance of wireless navy communications in general, tactical advantage was gained by combining radio on airships and sea ships in defending against U-boat attacks. Airships provided long distance communication over convoys, coordinating defenses with direction finding and signals intelligence on the location of submarine packs. They relayed information to the convoys, many of whose ships did not have long distance wireless in the early years of the war.

Wireless Navy Provided Leadership

By 1905, naval bureaucracies were overcoming their resistance to change, recognizing the strategic and tactical advantages of being in contact with their fleets. Up until then, ships just disappeared over the horizon. In particular, two forms of credit should be given to the U.S. Navy. First, it stimulated a competitive radio industry through huge procurement programs. Aided by nearly complete control over radio in 1917, it broke the Marconi monopoly and, after the war, supported the creation of Radio Corporation of America.

Second, it stimulated innovation especially through the Naval Research Laboratory. This was sort of the Palo Alto Research Center of high frequency radio communications in the first half of the century. You can read about the history of NRL if you are interested. Many of the techniques for evaluating HF propagation still used today were developed by the U.S. Navy between 1925-1928.