Radio Days
One time I was having a conversation with some in-laws (a brother and a sister) who were in their late 90s and still totally alert. They were old enough to tell me of their travails of having to “score” liquor from dealers in dodgy neighbourhoods in the US during prohibition.
Anyway, being young and naive of course I asked the “what was the greatest invention or discovery or change” in the 20th century? I was expecting, of course, something different from their unanimous answer: Radio. I responded with “What about TV?” Their answer? One of them said, moe or less, “TV was nothing special, just radio with pictures. We’d already got used to broadcasting”. Sadly, both of these great people are now dead.
Radio was the zeitgeist of the times. Just look through any magazine of the time and you see endless classifieds for radio operator/engineer classes, certifications, and so on. Radio in the 1920s was like the Internet in the 1990s – everyone wanted a piece of it, it was the new frontier of communications. Remember in the 1920s that the science fiction genre got started within the pages of radio electronics magazines!
Radio was magic stuff – binding together huge communities cheaply and effectively and “magically” without visible wires. People would huddle together and listen to words and music, exercising their imagination to create pictures within their heads that corresponded to the active narrative coming out of the little magic box. Radio provided an almost direct link from the mind of a single person to the minds of millions of people.
In fact, without radio it’s doubtful that the Nazis would so effectively have seized control and indoctrinated so many millions of people in Germany. It was odious Joseph Goebbels’s greatest enabling technology.
I note in passing that radio continues to be a huge agent of social change, for good or ill. The genocide in Rwanda was orchestrated and performed using “talk radio” hosts to coordinate the decentralized death squads. In a country with little infrastructure or reputation for efficiency, the Hutu butchers in Rwanda killed over a million people at a rate more than five times faster than the best extermination efforts of the stereotupically efficient Nazis during World War 2.
