How did radio get started in the United States, and how did it evolve from, first, wireless telegraphy, then wireless telephony and, finally, broadcast radio? Until the mid‐1980s, there was minimal serious historiography of radio in general, and early radio in particular. The best known and most widely used source was the first volume in Erik Barnouw’s trilogy on the history of broadcasting, A Tower in Babel (1966) (discussed in Chapter 20 by Gary Edgerton, this volume). Daniel Czitrom also provided a brief account of this era in Media and the American Mind (1982). The only other accounts of radio’s “prehistory,” when the device was known as wireless telegraphy and was used to transmit Morse code messages, were non‐academic and often gushing accounts of the invention in books with titles like Old Wires, New Waves (Harlow 1936). Gleason Archer’s History of Radio to 1926, published in 1938, while containing some important history, offered an overly generous account of the role that the Navy, and especially David Sarnoff, president of RCA, played in radio’s early development and was, by turns, untrustworthy or inaccurate. And Rupert Maclaurin provided an early technical history in Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (1949).
But beginning in 1976, with the publication of Hugh Aitken’s Syntony and Spark (1976), a technical history of the development of wireless, and followed by his prize‐winning The Continuous Wave (1985), a new era of wireless and radio historiography began. My own Inventing American Broadcasting came out in 1987 – and is discussed in Chapter 21 by Shawn VanCour, this volume – followed by work, primarily on the broadcast era, by Robert McChesney (1993), Susan Smulyan (1994), Michele Hilmes (1997), and others. By the 1990s, two new fields, radio studies and sound studies, had emerged from this work. The majority of work on radio focused on the post‐1920s broadcast era.
Why was radio’s early history ignored? The “radio boom” of the 1920s seemed so sudden, the diffusion of the device so dramatic, and the entry of voice and music into people’s homes without any connecting wires so miraculous (the word most frequently used at the time), that it eclipsed what came before. By contrast, the exchange of the Morse code between wireless operators could seem like an irrelevant prehistory with not nearly the cultural, political, and economic impact of radio. Yet by the 1970s, historians of technology were challenging the notion of technological revolutions, and also taking on the “Eureka” school of invention and its inventor‐as‐hero narratives that often accompanied such deterministic accounts of technical change. Scholars put technological determinism in the cross hairs. Now the emphasis was on technical evolution, and on the early histories of devices that led to seemingly sudden changes. The emphasis also changed from looking at the invention of individual devices – such as the light bulb, for example – to the development of technological systems within which such devices were embedded, refined, and marketed. A key figure in this shift was Thomas Hughes (1983) and the advancement of systems theory in books like Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930.
The 1970s and 1980s, then, saw the emergence of social constructivism – a focus on the role of struggle, negotiation, rejection, and subsequent new directions as inventors, companies, and everyday users interacted and competed over what final form an invention would take. Each of these social groups might have different technical goals or see different technical problems, and wrestle with them until “closure” is achieved and the thing that used to be the wireless telegraph became the thing people had in their homes: the radio. According to social constructivism, there is no predetermined, natural or inevitable way for devices or machines to evolve; rather, through this process some technical variants survive and flourish while others disappear. It was our job as historians to figure out why. The leaders in this historiographical shift were Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, whose 1987 edited collection The Social Construction of Technological Systems laid out this new theory of technological change. This prompted me as well as others, most notably Hugh Aitken, to study the twenty‐five‐year “prehistory” that culminated in what came to be called “the radio boom.”
So what did we not know about the early history of radio – wireless telegraphy – in the United States? Little had been written about the detailed technical evolution of the invention, the false starts and mis‐steps, as well as the major conceptual breakthroughs. A truly detailed history of the business strategies of the fledgling wireless firms that sought to diffuse and profit from the invention was also missing. Erik Barnouw’s A Tower in Babel (1966) provided crucial information about Marconi’s early work and the efforts of Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest to compete with him, but given the scope of his three‐volume history, Barnouw only devoted thirty‐eight pages to this phase of radio’s history. The role of the US Navy in shaping the invention’s development had been chronicled only in L. S. Howeth’s History of Communications‐Electronics in the United States Navy (1963), a little known book for specialists. And except for David Sarnoff’s self‐aggrandizing efforts to suggest that he, somehow, was the lone ham operator tracking the tragic fate of the Titanic, little had been written about the role of amateur operators (“hams”) in shaping the evolution and uses of radio, or about the central role that the Titanic disaster and other shipwrecks played in determining the early and groundbreaking regulation of radio and the electromagnetic spectrum. Finally, radio did not enter people’s imaginations de novo in the 1920s with the “radio boom.” Press coverage, often breathless and utopian, of wireless began in the late 1890s and also shaped radio’s uses, as well as its regulatory and corporate management.
One of the curses of radio history can be the shortage or absence of sources, especially about what went out “over the air” – or what was then called “the ether” – who heard what, and what they made of what they heard. In the case of radio’s early history this is especially true. Radio historians have to be detectives, scouring multiple archives, and sometimes we have to create our own. It turns out that the early inventors produced significant correspondence as they sought to promote and manage their fledging businesses, and an early wireless enthusiast, George Clark, somehow got a hold of all this correspondence and managed to save it in what came to be known as the Clark Collection. Yet such collections can be hard to learn about or find; Barnouw made no mention of it. I discovered it through Howeth’s book, which said the collection was at MIT. It was not. After several inquiries with various MIT references librarians, I finally found one who remembered the collection: it was now at the Smithsonian.
The collection – hundreds of boxes – had not been catalogued and some of it was a mish‐mash of RCA press releases intermixed with important memos, so the researcher had to check box after box to find relevant material. (Hugh Aitken and I met this way, both scouring the Clark Collection at, fortuitously, the same time.) But fortunately, much of the correspondence of the early inventors had been filed together, and this proved to be a treasure trove that Aitken and I mined to overlapping but different ends. A historian working through the faded copies of all of this material can be pulled into inventors’ often passionate and self‐aggrandizing points of view about their positions and contributions. Therefore, as Hugh Aitken reminded me as we compared notes and interpretations for our respective books, “always be skeptical of your sources!”
But I also became interested in the “bottom‐up” story of wireless; I did not want to tell only the technical and business side of the story. How was this new device, first known as wireless telegraphy, received? What sense was made of it, what did people think it might do to their lives, to society and culture? How did these understandings and imaginings evolve over time, as wireless itself turned into radio broadcasting? This is where you have to complement the existing archives with those of your own. So even as I was tracking down and visiting institutional archives, I began to create my own, starting with the technical journals of the time such as Electrical World and Scientific American and moving onto the more popular press. We know that all archives are incomplete, have their own biases based on inclusion, omissions, and point of view, and the ones we make are no exception. But the ones we create can be, and should be, a counterbalance to those created by institutions and by political and corporate elites.
Except for “radio pioneers” who left behind memories of their experiences as amateur operators or broadcast radio’s early days, there was, of course, no archive with everyday people’s reactions to early radio. So newspapers and magazines had to serve as a proxy for these. But press accounts, first of wireless telegraphy and then later of radio, also played a central role in the social construction of radio in shaping people’s expectations of these devices ...
