Radio is magic. Voices, sounds from across the globe magically appear in our living rooms and kitchens. In the early twentieth century, this magic was new, revolutionary, and poorly understood. It was the object of scientific investigation, but, more importantly, it was also the domain of tinkerers, âhackersâ, citizen scientists, and hobbyists. Radio was not only a symbol of modernity, but it was also a site where individuals wrestled with and ultimately came to terms with the new and often frightening wave of inventions, which washed over popular culture and individual lives like a great technological tsunami. Today, radio is so commonplace in industrialized societies that most of us donât even realize that it is there. When have you last seen an automobile without a radio? Our phones, computers, stereos, and even often our toasters and refrigerators are all today radios as well. What in the 1900s was cutting-edge science and by the 1920s and 1930s was the dominant form of mass media is today just one component of a web-like media system which reaches from our ear buds to the internet. We need to look back at the time when radio was new to understand how we got to our current reality, where radio is ubiquitous. It wasnât always this way.
This book shows how radio, then a wild and mysterious technology, was appropriated and mediated by ordinary individuals in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century as a hobby or leisure-time activity. In particular, I look at how private associations, clubs, became the locus of this process. Within these clubs, technology, in the form of radio, intersected with the public sphere. This is a much wider process and really concerns all industrialized societies at the time, but I use Germany as a case study, for reasons I explain below.
If there is a single main point, it is precisely that âit takes a villageâ of social forms and institutions for humans to interact with technology in a meaningful way. Our engagement with technology is always rooted in social structures, institutions, and frameworks.1 The radio clubs in Germany provided much of the social context within which individuals could come to grips with radio. Without all of this human âpackagingâ around the basic technology, there could have been no human interaction with it.
What the Book Is, and Isnât
This book is a history of radio as a hobby in Germany, and the private associations within which that hobby was pursued, in the first half (roughly) of the twentieth century. This is not a history of broadcast radio, though broadcast radio plays an important part in the story. It is also not a history of radio technology or equipment or the science of radio or even a history of radio scientists, though these, too, are important elements of the larger context. And while it does tell the story from a German point of view, the history of radio, and particularly of the radio hobby, canât be told without periodic reference to other countries and to the international community of radio hobbyists , which began to develop even before the First World War. There are certainly going to be references back to the US or to Britain, simply because the US was the main point of reference for the rest of the world when it came to radio, while Great Britain was a major point of reference for radio enthusiasts in Europe.
When we study the new mass media of the early twentieth century, we often neglect looking at the social structures (both formal and informal) that grew up around them. The informal social structures that developed to help people cope with/use/assimilate the new technology are particularly important, not least because they are very understudied, certainly compared to the official structures of the media or the governmental/legal frameworks within which radio was organized. The story of radio is not simply one of governments, universities, and businesses. Hobbyists and private organizations created to further their interests are a central part of the story. Moreover, individuals engaged with technology in their own ways, and for their own reasons. To be sure, they did so within a specific political/cultural/economic/institutional context, which set certain limits and tended to direct engagement in particular ways. Yet within these limits, individuals (users) engaging with the new technology did not restrict themselves to what politicians, scientists, and industry had imagined, but followed their own paths, making the technology truly their own. While this is true of many, if not all, mass technologies, it was particularly important at the dawn of the radio age, for reasons both scientific and social.
Technological Revolution in the Twentieth Century
The history of the twentieth century is deeply marked by rapid technological progress. It affected then, and still affects today nearly every aspect of society, from sexuality and personal relationships to economics and warfare. No history of modern times is complete without an understanding of the technological context, which has been characterized not least by constant and sometimes violent change. This is certainly true of communications media, which have gone through a series of ârevolutionsâ since the invention of printing with movable type. But technology doesnât exist in a vacuum, independent of human agency. Technology is a human product and, as such, is inextricably embedded in multiple webs of human agency. Communications technology conforms to this paradigm particularly closely, for its fundamental purpose is to allow humans to communicate with one another.2 Radio is a crucial media to study in this regard. The adoption of radio was extremely rapid, and the medium is also highly strategic.
At the same time, since the seventeenth century, at least in the Western world, the role of independent or spontaneous private associations (clubs) has become central to modern life. Together with new media technologies, private associations have brought about a âpublic sphereâ, independent from government and organized religion, which characterizes modern life.3 This remains the case today even in the most oppressive dictatorship, for even there, huge effort must be expanded to control and suppress the development of an independent public sphere, a task made increasingly difficult as technology empowers individuals to better communicate with one another. When (mass) technology and the public sphere collide, things happen.
The importance of the topic is huge. Though radio was not the first of our modern technological revolutions , and though it might seem somewhat antiquated today in our era of internet streaming and high-definition images coming at us from all directions, it is still ubiquitousâremember, your smartphone is nothing more than a radio grafted onto a computer. Moreover, it was a quintessentially modern technology, not least because almost immediately after it was discovered, a web of hobbyists and enthusiasts grew up around itâhobbyists who often made central contributions to the science and technology itself.4 Radio is so very modern because it is an object of play (a hobby) as well as a tool for work.5
A great wave of new technologies and mass medias rolled across the world in the first half of the twentieth century, and invaded nearly every facet of life, in the industrialized countries, and then, increasingly, beyond their borders. Some will argue that the sheer amount of new technology with which people were confronted was greater at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, while others will argue that it is greaterâand more complexâtoday. Yet the first half of the twentieth century saw not only (or not so much) the introduction of new technologies but, more importantly, their mass adoption. Technology, technological change, and concomitant social change became not only a central characteristic of modern life but also something which, on the whole, generated real enthusiasm.
It also generated a nearly equal amount of fear, or at least discomfort and concern. The pace of life seemed to quicken, certainty seemed destroyed (even in the solidity of the physical world), and people came to feel that they were the pawns of huge forces they could not control. They also feared that the change brought by new technology would cause them to be left behind. But this book argues that many sought to address their fear by embracing the technology. To understand the new technologies, even to control them, many people sought to know them. Knowledge, not least of complex technical systems, really is power. By the early twentieth century, people no longer sought this knowledge within the bounds of existing institutions such as universities or churchesâat least not exclusively so. Instead, they very literally brought the mystifying and potentially scary science of radio into their own homes, domesticating it by putting it on the kitchen table and tinkering with it until it revealed all its secrets.6 Moreover, radio enthusiasts formed new institutionsâor, more properly, adapted existing onesâto be able to pursue their new hobby in the company of like-minded others. Radio and other technological hobbies thus quickly joined gardening, sewing, singing, and sports as the focus of private clubs or associations, even as it simultaneously became the purpose of countless new businesses, and found another major social form in radio broadcasting.
The âRadio Hobbyâ
The focus of this book is what I call the âradio hobbyâ community in Germany. That requires some definition because we conceive radio differently today. By the term âradio hobbyâ I mean all those who occupied themselves with radio in an active manner as a free-time activity. Those who simply listened passively to broadcast radioâsurely the largest group in German society at the timeâare not included, though all those who are included did also listen to radio broadcasts. But to be a hobby, a personâs engagement with radio had to have an active component.
What I call âthe radio hobbyâ spanned a diverse but very large group of radio enthusiasts, ranging from do-it-yourselfers (who simply wished to build a usable receiver, since commercially manufactured radios in Germany remained very expensive until 1933â1934), to those whom we would today call â...