This New Noise Read Free

his 1924 book Broadcast Over Britain . ‘It is a reversal of the natural law, that the more one takes, the less there is for others … There is no limit to the amount that may be drawn off.’ And because everyone can have as much as they like of it, broadcasting, at least as delivered by the fledgling BBC, is no respecter of persons; it is the same for everyone: ‘Most of the good things of this world are badly distributed and most people have to go without them. Wireless is a good thing, but it may be shared by all alike, for the same outlay, and to the same extent … The genius and the fool, the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously … there is no first and third class.’ Broadcasting, said Reith, had the effect of ‘making the nation as one man’. It was Reith who attached this Arnoldian, culturally unifying ideology to the idea of broadcasting. This ideology, despite the optimism of American broadcasting pioneers such as the engineer David Sarnoff, who in June 1922 wrote of wireless’s function as ‘entertaining, informing andeducating the nation’, was lacking in the United States, which was in the grip of a wireless craze by the mid-1920s. There, a cacophony of competing commercial stations grew up, strung between coast and coast. By 1925 there were 5.5 million American wireless sets and 346 stations.
    That the BBC should have been set up as a company and a monopoly, and then a corporation in the public interest, was not inevitable, but the result of a series of incremental decisions at first pragmatic and then solidified into ideology. And before broadcasting was armoured in Reithian principles, it was first a technology. In the village of Pontecchio Marconi, a few kilometres south of Bologna in central Italy, is the remarkable sight of Guglielmo Marconi’s mausoleum, a kind of manmade travertine cave hewn into the rolling lawns of the Villa Griffone, the elegant nineteenth-century house he shared with his Scots-Irish wife Annie Jameson, scion of the Jameson whiskey empire. An enthusiastic fascist in later life, Marconi was accorded a state funeral by Mussolini, and his tomb has all the pomp – and distinctive, ruggedly geometric style – associated with the aesthetics of that regime. ‘ Diede con la scoperta il sigillo a un’epoca della storia umana ,’ declares the epitaph inside the monument, itself a phrase from the speech Mussolini gave after his death. It translates: ‘With his discovery he set his mark upon an era of human history.’
    In truth, in the way of most scientific discoveries, it was a cluster of advances by a number of researchers that led the way to broadcasting. It was the German Heinrich Hertz who, before he died aged only thirty-six in 1894, demonstratedthe existence of electromagnetic waves. In 1902 an American, R. A. Fessenden, used wireless waves to carry the human voice over the distance of a mile. The north Staffordshire-born Oliver Lodge developed a tuning device to control the wavelength of a receiver. There were French, American and Russian discoveries, too, in the years before the First World War. Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephony – sending signals or the voice ‘through the ether’ without wire or cable – was becoming a reality. Marconi coupled his celebrated transatlantic radio experiments with an eye for commercial opportunities and a talent for business. In 1897, he founded the Marconi Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company. He did so in Britain, because it seemed to him that radio could be commercially exploited as a means of communications to shipping – and Britain was the great marine mercantile nation. Broadcasting – the notion of one voice speaking to many – was not yet recognised as a prospect in view, and certainly not as a virtue of the technology. As Asa Briggs pointed out in the first of his magisterial five volumes on the history of British broadcasting, the notion that radio signals could be heard widely was at first regarded as