Signal support encompasses all aspects of designing, installing, data communications networks that employ single and multi-channel satellite, tropospheric scatter, terrestrial microwave, switching, messaging, video-teleconferencing, visual information, and other related systems.

[2] While serving as a medical officer in Texas in 1856, Albert James Myer proposed that the Army use his visual communications system, called aerial telegraphy (or "wig-wag").

[3] Major Myer first used his visual signalling system on active service in New Mexico during the early 1860s Navajo expedition.

For nearly three years, Myer was forced to rely on detailed personnel, although he envisioned a separate, trained professional military signal service.

Even in the Civil War, the wigwag system, restricted to line-of-sight communications, was waning in the face of the electric telegraph.

Signal Corps detachments participated in campaigns fighting Native Americans in the west, such as the Powder River Expedition of 1865.

Within 12 years, the Signal Corps had constructed, and was maintaining and operating, some 4,000 miles of telegraph lines along the country's western frontier.

Within a decade, with the assistance of Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, Myer commanded a weather service of international acclaim until his death in 1880.

One of the groups under the command of LT Adolphus Greely was to write another grueling chapter of suffering and extinction in the history of the Arctic.

In October 1903, Congress handed the then Chief Signal Officer Brigadier General Adolphus Greely what may be considered the supreme challenge.

[citation needed] Needless to say, the first attempts at flying were failures, but Greely handed the contract to the Wright brothers who piloted the first aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

In 1908, on Fort Myer, Virginia, the Wright brothers made test flights of the Army's first airplane built to Signal Corps' specifications.

While the new American voice radios were superior to the radiotelegraph sets, telephone and telegraph remained the major technology of World War I.

A lieutenant colonel and 500 enlisted men became hospital, mess, and repair shop attendants, relieving American soldiers from these duties.

In particular the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) formed a fleet, unofficially known as the "Catboat Flotilla" and formally as the CP fleet, that served as command and communication vessels during amphibious operations, starting with two Australian schooners Harold and Argosy Lemal acquired by the Army and converted during the first half of 1943 by Australian firms into communications ships with AWA radio sets built by Amalgamated Wireless of Australia installed.

The Army had built her in the United States in 1942, a sturdy, wooden, diesel-driven vessel only 114 feet long, but broad, of 370 tons, intended for use in the Aleutians.

The Australian sets were intended for long-range CW signals operating in the high frequencies; the SCRs were short-range VHF FM radios for use in the fleet net and for ship-toshore channels.

[9] Many film industry personalities served in the Signal Corps, including Stan Lee, an American comic book writer, Tony Randall, the actor, and Jean Shepherd, radio storyteller, author and narrator of A Christmas Story.

In 1942 General George C. Marshall ordered the creation of the Army Pictorial Service (APS) to produce motion pictures for the training, indoctrination, and entertainment of the American forces and their Allies.

The crystals were able to be used in the manufacture of electronic components, and made the United States largely independent of foreign imports for this critical mineral.

Although they did not invent the transistor, Fort Monmouth scientists were among the first to recognize its importance, particularly in military applications, and did pioneer significant improvements in its composition and production.

In June 1950, with the onset of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman quickly received the necessary authorization to call the National Guard and Organized Reserves to 21 months of active duty.

Following the arrest of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1950, two former Fort Monmouth scientists, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, defected to the Soviet Union.

On 31 August 1953, having received word of possible subversive activities from Fort Monmouth's commanding general, Kirke B. Lawton, the Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), Senator Joseph McCarthy, suspected a spy ring still existed in the Signal Corps labs.

Others are members of non-signal Army units, providing communications capability for those with other jobs to accomplish (e.g. infantry, medical, armor, etc.)

A radio signal beamed up into the atmosphere is "bounced" back down to Earth with astonishingly good results, bypassing debilitating terrain.

Talking through signal nodes, MSE established a seamless connection from the battlefield even back to commercial telephone lines.

Significant to the Signal soldiers, MSE was fielded on the backs of Humvee, rather than on the larger, less-mobile M35 2-1/2 ton cargo trucks—the "deuce and a half".

[20] Later generations of these radios combined the communications security (COMSEC) encryption devices with the receiver/transmitter, making a single easier-to-program unit.

Notable members of the Signal Corps include General of the Army (later General of the Air Force) Henry H. Arnold, Lester Asheim, Frank Capra, John Cheever, Frank Lautenberg, Stan Lee,[31] Russ Meyer, C. Bruce Pickette, Tony Randall, Jean Shepherd, John C. Holmes, Julius Rosenberg, Darryl Zanuck, Samuel Alito, and Carl Foreman.