The Electronics Revolution Inventing the Future

22 From Wireless to Radio
dance bands would naturally hear the news bulletins and become much better informed.
This particularly applied to women stuck at home, who could pick up quite an education
without really noticing.
While at this time most people would have called the device a ‘wireless’, the international
word ‘radio’ was beginning to creep in. In 1923, the BBC issued its own guide to
the programs and named the Radio Times. Despite the severe Director General John Reith,
with his motto of ‘inform, educate and entertain’, trying to keep it ‘highbrow’, it expanded
into a general service, broadcasting everything from news, to weather forecasts, to football
results, music and talks, as well as panel games. 27 It was so successful that in 1927 it was
taken over by the government and became the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Official attitudes took some time to change. In 1923, the King didn’t allow the broadcasting
of the wedding of the Duke of York (later King George VI). By the next year the
King made a broadcast himself, and in 1932 he reluctantly made a Christmas broadcast.
Only 4 years later King Edward VIII made his abdication speech to the nation on the radio,
and it was natural for Chamberlain to announce the outbreak of the Second World War the
same way. It provided a way to effectively ‘speak to the nation’, a thing that had never
existed before.
It is often said that in the Second World War everyone in Britain had a radio and so the
government could communicate that way with the people. It isn’t strictly true. As Fig. 3.3
shows, only about two thirds of homes had a set. What is true, though, is that this was sufficient
penetration for those without a radio to soon be told important news by their neighbors
who did have one. Thus it was still able to perform the task of disseminating
information to the whole country, quickly and simply.
So it was that a technology which had grown up as wireless telegraphy and later telephony
as a communication medium for government, business and the few, had metamorphosed
into something that served the mass of people. No one at the beginning, when
those first shaky experiments proved that electromagnetic signals really could travel
through the air, would have believed where it was to lead, and quite the effect it would
have on everyday life. They would have been even more surprised to find that this was
only the beginning.
NOTES
1. Belrose, J. S. (1995) Fessenden and Marconi: Their differing technologies and transatlantic
experiments during the first decade of this century, available at: http://www.ieee.ca/millennium/
radio/radio_differences.html
2. Fessenden, R., Inventing the wireless telephone and the future. Canadian Institute of Electrical
and Electronic Engineers, available at: http://www.ieee.ca/millennium/radio/radio_wireless.
html
3. Fessenden, H. M. (1940) Fessenden, Builder of Tomorrows. New York, Coward- McCann, p. 153,
also available at: https://archive.org/stream/fessendenbuilder00fessrich#page/n7/mode/2up
4. GB patent 1901 18430.
5. Pearson, G. L. and Brattain, W. H. (1955) History of semiconductor research. Proceedings of
the Institute of Radio Engineers, December 1955. Walter Brattain was one of the inventors of
the transistor.