Celebrated as San Francisco’s “Boy Inventor” in the San Francisco Call, Francis J. McCarty initially financed his inventions with various jobs including clerking at a dry goods house. His formal education had ended at the age of 12, when he left St. Ignatius College Preparatory.
By 1903 he reported success in developing a radiotelephone capable of transmitting over a distance of four miles. In 1904 The McCarty Wireless Telephone Co. was formed, and it was announced that McCarty had transferred his inventions to the company in exchange for $1,500 cash and 120,250 shares of stock. Because McCarty was a minor, his older brother Henry was appointed as his guardian in the matter.
Having devised one of the earliest working wireless radiotelephone systems while still a teenager, he demonstrated it successfully in 1905 for reporters at San Francisco’s Cliff House, transmitting audible voice signals over a distance of a mile and a half.
Later, following the cataclysmic San Francisco earthquake and fire, he relocated to Oakland, and in May 1906 was killed just two weeks shy of his 18th birthday when the horse cart he was driving overturned.
McCarty’s brother Henry continued his work, and in 1907 two U.S. patents originally applied for by Francis were granted, which described “high frequency spark” transmitters capable of making audio transmissions. The technology would be employed successfully by the U.S. military during World War I.
It would be 1919 before Francis McCarty’s estate was settled. By then, the McCarty Wireless stock was worth about $100,000–nearly $2 million dollars in 2026 dollars.