ther service until 1880, the date of Myer's death. In the Spanish American War of 1898, the role of the Signal Corps expanded. In addition to visual signaling, including heliograph, the corps supplied telephone and telegraph lines and cable communications, started the use of telephones in combat, used combat photography, and renewed the use of balloons (Tuschen, n.d., p.1). Right after that war, the Signal Corps constructed the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System, introducing the first wireless telegraph in the western hemisphere.
In 1907, an Aeronautical Division was established within the office of the chief Signal Office, and in 1908, the Wright brothers made test flights of the Army's first airplane built to the specifications of the Signal Corps. Gradually, the communications of the Signal Corps became more sophisticated, having a part in World War I. Chief Signal Office MG George Squier worked in conjunction with private industry to perfect radio tubes while creating a major signal laboratory at Camp Alfred Vail in New Jersey, later called Fort Monmouth. Today there is a U.S. Army Communications Electronics Museum at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, showing a variety of exhibits featuring photographs and objects telling the story of the Signal Corps development, including radar, transistors, night vision devices, communication and weather satellites, mass production of printed circuits, solar batteries, and other items which are common today but began with early communications in the Army.
Early radiotelephones developed by the Signal Corps were introduced into the European theatre of the war in 1918. Telephone and telegraph were the major technological accomplishments of World War I. (Tuschen, n.d., p.2). It is a little known historical fact, but some of the first women to serve overseas in the Army were in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. General Pershing called for bilingual (French-English) long-distance ...