High up in attic room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, young Arthur Collins often got a view of the world from the other end of his 20-meter radio signal. On the 3rd of August, 1925, those high-frequency transmissions brought the frozen landscape of Greenland into sharp focus for him: Arthur made contact via CW with the Arctic Expedition undertaken on behalf of the US Navy by explorer Donald MacMillan. Their exchange of CW messages ultimately traveled so much farther, in a way, because the shortwave signals from Arthur's 1,000-watt homebrew transmitter accomplished what the Navy's longwave transmissions, lacking the ability for skip, could not. Media attention followed, of course, and the teenager's smarts with radio technology soon became well-known.

Like MacMillan, Arthur Collins himself was an explorer and his new paths across - and above - the world were shaped with increasingly shorter radio waves. The young inventor became a pioneer, pushing that early technology in inventive ways. He was barely a decade away from becoming a businessman and seeing the rise of Collins Radio, Rockwell Collins and Collins Aerospace.

The Collins Aerospace Museum in Cedar Rapids has been celebrating him all month on the 100th anniversary of that MacMillan contact, displaying artifacts, documents and photographs that capture his decades of discovery that began when he was a young explorer. The museum features a replica of the attic space that was his laboratory and radio shack where it all began. The replica room was created by Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association with help from students at the Cedar Rapids Metro High School. Like young Arthur Collins, no doubt many of these teenagers are already on course to make some cutting-edge discoveries of their own.