The way in which Marconi responded to the backlash he received from prominent British scientists like Lodge is interesting in an essay focused on the category of ‘imagined use’. Marconi emphasised the reality of his achievements with wireless telegraphy.

Only at the end of his article, discussed as part of a section entitled merely ‘Further Proofs of Practicability’, does Marconi actually mention the demonstrations carried out at the Dover meeting in 1899 which are described simply as the exhibition of ‘my system … before the English and French bodies.’ More than this, he tried to position himself, just as Fleming had attempted during his lecture at Dover, within a self-constructed ‘great man’ theory of the development of wireless telegraphy as the successor to Volta.

In addition to giving interviews and releasing press statements, Marconi’s strategic use of the media included the publication of articles written by himself. Most important here, was a piece he wrote for the Fortnightly Review entitled ‘The Practicability of Wireless Telegraphy’ which was published in June 1902 – almost three years after the Dover meeting.41 

After lauding his invention and his own talent in numerous interviews before departing by ship for the USA, Marconi succeeded in raising considerable expectations both about the demonstrations of his wireless telegraphy at the Dover meeting and his own future achievements. His absence at the meeting only added to those expectations, the assembled crowds being left to imagine what great things Marconi had left Britain for America to pursue.

his sort of speculation offers a good example of the way in which Marconi successfully caught the imaginations of those who reported on and read about his exploits – groups which included many with little or no first-hand experience of wireless telegraphy

This reluctance to pursue financial advantage from his research and to engage the broader public about his work reflected an ideal of the scientist as a selfless seeker after truth, a leisured paragon of moral manliness, still prevailing in BAAS circles in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Seen in this way, the chief goal of the demonstrations appears to have been to entertain and impress the assembled crowds of British and French men of science, their families and friends, rather than to contribute to the scientific debates of the meeting.

The spectrum became more crowded as too many enthusiasts, many of them beginners, clogged the air with all sorts of transmissions. They "gossip about everything under the sun," reported one operator. "They ask each other for the baseball or football scores, make appointments to meet the next day, compare their lessons

For the first time in America, men were being invisibly bound to­gether by and in the airwaves, not by necessity, but for fun, to learn from and to establish contact with others. Those involved in the new hobby saw larger-than-life reflections of themselves in popular books, magazines, and newspapers

Through his Harford Radio Club, he contacted amateurs in March 1914, inviting them to join a league and to convert their stations into official relay stations. The name of his organization was the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). The response to his invitations was so enthusiastic that within four months the league boasted two hundred official relay stations across the United States.

The emergence of the boy inventor-hero is important to the early history of radio because the genre of popular juvenile writing surround­ing this new hero provided information about wireless and encouraged boys to experiment with the invention

In the hands of the amateurs, all sorts of technical recycling and adaptive reuse took place. Discarded photography plates were wrapped with foil and became condensers. The brass spheres from an old bedstead were transformed into a spark gap, and were connected to an ordinary automobile ignition coil-cum-transmitter.

Trapped be­tween the legacy of genteel culture and the pull of the new primitivism of mass culture, many boys reclaimed a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology. The boys lacking "animal mag­netism" could still triumph over nature if they controlled the right kind of machine. If they failed to recognize how the desire for adventure, com­ bat, and the assertion of strength, on the one hand, could be reconciled with the need to prepare for life in the modern world, on the other, popular books and magazines were there to remind them. Everything could be achieved through technical mastery

Increasingly, what landed a young man a good job, what gave him an edge in the race for success, was intelligence, education, and certain skills.

Willenborg, an otherwise ordinary young man, had become a celeb­rity through mechanical tinkering. He told the reporter that he expected to be exchanging messages with Paris and Berlin within a month. He claimed that his system was superior to all others and that his messages would be ''sent and received without interference or detection" by any other system. The young man's claims were not challenged; rather, they served as secondary headlines for the article. To certify the boy's success further, the reporter noted: "Young as he is, Willenborg has been em­ployed by the United States to perfect wireless tests aboard ship, and has been highly paid' for his work."

Changes in customers' practices may have helped spur a change in advertising-although there is no direct evidence of this in the industry archives-but some sort of mismatch existed for a long time between actual use and marketing. Its source appears to be, in large measure, cultural.

Industry leaders long ignored or repressed telephone sociability­ for the most part, I suggest, because such conversations did not fit their understandings of what the technology was supposed to be for

Official AT&T opinions came closer to Hall's in the later 1920s when executives announced that, whereas the industry had previ­ously thought of telephone service as a practical necessity, they now realized that it was more: it was a "convenience, comfort, luxury"; its value included its "trivial" social uses

Alexan­ der Graham Bell himself forecast social chitchats using his inven­tion. He predicted that eventually Mrs. Smith would spend an hour on the telephone with Mrs. Brown "very enjoyably ... cutting up Mrs. Robinson."32 But for decades few of his successors saw it that way.

Have you noticed how readily the lips part into smiles ... ?" And 1939 copy states, "Some one thinks of some one, reaches for the telephone, and all is well." A 1937 AT&T advertise­ment reminds us that "the telephone is vital in emergencies, but that is not the whole of its service.... Friendship's path often fol­lows the trail of the telephone wire." These family-and-friend motifs, more frequent and frank in the 1930s

PT&T advertisements for 1914 and 1915 include, aside from infor­mational notices and general paeans to the telephone, a few sugges­tions for businessmen

During Bell's monopoly, before 1894, telephone service consisted basically of an individual line for which a customer paid an annual flat fee allowing unlimited calls within the exchange area.

Subscribers nevertheless persisted in using the telephone for "trivial gossip."

“Women have performed more than their part in this great struggle for democracy, freedom, and liberty,” Senator William Thompson said. In the U.S., France, and England, they had produced food, guns, ammunition, planes, and trains. They loaded baggage, drove trucks, operated switchboards, and were “ready, if necessary, to shoulder the gun and march to the front themselves.”

“These women will be civilian employees of the Signal Corps and will have the privileges and allowances now prescribed or which may hereafter be prescribed by Army regulations and General Orders for Army Nurses.”

In addition to wages, the Army would grant billeting allowances on the same basis as nurses. Recruits would wear a regular military uniform.

Every word of Pershing’s cablegram implied military service without stating it. U.S. legal code specified that only males could enlist in the regular Army (the reserves were not limited by gender), but responsible officers pounced on Pershing’s larger intent: get qualified bilingual operators in uniform and ship them to France ASAP. Let bureaucrats work out the niceties late

Hundreds joined within weeks. They were ranked Yeoman (F), for female. When newspapers dubbed them “yeomanettes,” Daniels objected, “If a woman does a job, she ought to have the name of the job.” The Secretary insisted on equal compensation, too.

“Enroll women in the naval service as yeomen and we will have the best clerical assistance the country can provide.”6 (More than a third of the nation’s office personnel were then female.)

The story of America’s first women soldiers allows us to see what Wood- row Wilson and leaders in other democracies—new, old, and about to be demolished—eventually saw.

American women became soldiers before they became voters. This is not coincidental. Propertyless white men at the end of the Revolution of 1776 and African-American males at the end of the Civil War had a similar experience. The Vietnam War later gave the vote to eighteen-year-olds. Throughout the nation’s history, soldiering has established qualifications for full citizenship.1

Smith, a self-described gentleman, was arrested at 3 a.m. on 19 February 1877 near his home in Islington for sexually assaulting a messenger named Walter Bush- rod

“Alternate” masculinities were all suspect in a culture that required men to be breadwinning husbands above all else. Homosexual acts undermined the vulnerable balance at work in the movements be- tween domesticity, the workplace, homosociability, and masculine display on the streets.

As Jeffery reminds us, these unspeakable actions spilled out of the GPO buildings:

Jeffery went on to posit what had long been assumed: that the structure of the workplace also fostered homosexual practices

hey were usually supervised by low-paid matrons or older telegraph boys who had achieved the rank of “corporal” or “lance corporal.”

Both the uniform and postmen’s social standing changed dramatically in the Victorian era. As the Post Office developed into a far-reaching and affordable network of communication, the postman became common, in both senses of the word

Some of these messengers incorporated the knowledge, accessibility, and look required for their sanctioned jobs into sexual labor that complemented their miniscule earnings.

The readiness and ease with which many London telegraph boys transitioned between sex work and postal work while out on delivery and even in the heart of offices was part of what made the liberal city tick.

Telegraph boys were in no way exalted—at most they were soldier heroes in training

London’s “unnameable” homosexual subcultures and its proudly touted communications systems were intimately networked, and the young telegraph/rent boys who exploited the possibilities of London’s sexual subcultures while embodying state order, efficiency, and prescribed mobility ultimately acted in their capacity as a unique type of modern laborer.

For Otter, a network is a “physical system, which, along with its human operators, links points across reasonably large tracts of space.”7 While networks, including the telegraph system, expanded and became more standardized and “self-correcting,” they also became “nodalized.” As Otter explains, “telegraph technology was stratified and knotty, typified by points of concentration, junctions, and lines of interconnection, leaving vast swathes of space simply ignored.”8 These technologies of freedom, then, were not universally accessible.

The American District Telegraph Company employs on an average 550 boys, who are distributed throughout the city among twenty-three offices

Every boy, therefore, who is employed by the American District Telegraph Company is put into a training-school, and this school is a very interesting one

There is another class of telegraph-boys, to whom I now which to introduce you.

You can see, by what you have read, that a telegraph-boy does not lead a lazy life. His hours of duty, if he is a day boy, are from 7 A.M. until 6:30 P.M. Of course, only a few boys are required to deliver messages at night, as a rule. But there are times in the year when a great many message come in for delivery between 1 and 7 A.M. At such times, ambitious boys are given an opportunity to do extra work.

It is then put thorough a steam copying-press, and is next passed to a clerk, who puts it into an envelope, on which he writes the number and the address.

In the first place, the boys are not paid by the day or week, but so much for each message delivered. This gives every boy an incentive to deliver every message as promptly as possible, and to hurry back for another one

Every one who lives in New York, and those who visit that city, see in the streets a great many boys wearing a very neat uniform, who hurry along as if they were intrusted with very important business, as indeed they are.

Thus history is not the mere writing down of static, dead events in a fixed chronology. Rather, it is a continuous and interactive process, constantly taken up, shaken up, revised, and utilized by people in the here and now, including the readers of this book.

Race, ethnicity and gender, in particular, provide some of our culture’s primary social strategies of classification and stratification, in real life as on TV; we’ll see how radio and television participated in dominant ways of thinking, used gender and race in their programs and industry structures, challenged the dominant social system, and generally contributed to our ongoing social shifts of power.

When’s the last time many of us saw a sitcom from Singapore, a soap opera from Mexico, a news report from Russia, a police drama from France? American television networks and producers tent to produce U.S. adaptations of foreign programs, under the assumption that Americans won't like the originals

Thus the history of 1950s America becomes a pastoral vision of moms at home, even though by 1960, fully 40 percent of American women worked outside the home and made up over a third of the total workforce,

The story of Haiti’s revolution was downplayed or written out of accepted Western history by white American and European writers unable to face the contradiction between treasured democratic ideals and the kind of race-based thinking that allowed and justified enslavement.

The family sitcoms mentioned earlier are historical texts, produced in the past under a particular set of circumstances. Does that make them history?

Most families in the United States were in fact not nearly as affluent, “non-ethnic,” or “traditional” as their TV models. The statistical majority of U.S. citizens occupied lower-middle and working class jobs and neighborhoods, identified strongly with their diverse ethnic and racial heritages, and included a far higher percentage of women working outside the home.

Not only were all the families affluent and mysteriously non-ethnic, so was everyone else in their neighborhood and social circle.

Where does this perception of the past, specifically the 1950s, come from? Certainly many programs on television during this time did depict such families, and many of them were highly rated

many points at which your experience of our mediated culture departs from mine that need to be included

You will be encouraged not to read this history as a seamless whole, as an inevitable and already completed progression of events, but as a creative process of interpretation and construction in which you can, at any moment, intervene

each book starts with a preconceived framework of ideas—about what’s important and what’s not, who counts in history and who doesn’t, which sets of causes and effects are relevant to the story and which aren’t—that all too often the author hides behind a mask of neutral knowledge and objectivity.

how a shift in one direction can cut off another

Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.

Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations.

"History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past

History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding.

This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shi in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes ofchange.