Radio ― The Life Story of a Technology

This book chronicles the history of radio as technology and as media. Radio grew from a clumsy, temperamental form of wireless telegraph to a system that is so ubiquitous and easy to use that it has disappeared to users as a technology and became part of the fabric of human existence. This biography charts the growth of the technical end of radio, starting with the history of electricity, and moving through the invention of vacuum tubes, the heterodyne, FM, transistors, and microchips. But the history of radio is not just wires and electricity--it's the story of strange characters, deep thinkers, visionary mystics, hyperactive minds, ambitious souls, power hungry demagogues, and utopian humanists; all of whom strove to make radio into what they thought it should be.

Brian Regal teaches American history and the history of science and technology at the TCI College of Technology in New York—the school originally founded by Guglielmo Marconi in 1909. His previous publications include Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Ashgate, 2002) and Human Evolution: A Guide to the Debates (ABC-CLIO, 2004). His most recent article is Maxwell Perkins Editor of Eugenics in The Princeton University Library Chronicle (February, 2005).