Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home

Rubens, a former BBC Radio producer, investigates how wireless listening touched “every home” across the U.K. in this affable debut study. She begins by explaining late Victorian technological developments that laid the groundwork for radio’s ascendance, including the birth of the phonograph and both wired and wireless telegraphy. Guglielmo Marconi first patented wireless communication in 1896, but it took decades for radio to grow from a technology used primarily by hobbyists to a mass communication system that, by 1938, was accessible to 34 million people in the U.K. out of a population of 47.5 million. Radio’s shift from something enjoyed in public to something heard in private is what defined its “first era” from 1922 to 1939, when everything that “listeners now take for granted was novel” and experienced as a cultural sea change, like the 1936 broadcasting of King George V’s death. Rubens also spotlights how the medium had an outsized cultural impact on women first, as they often made up the majority of listeners due to their being at home. Stuffed with insights, quotes, and anecdotes, from Bristol locals reminiscing about their first encounters with the radio to profiles of famous early BBC presenters, Rubens’s account can occasionally meander. Still, Anglophiles and BBC regulars will find it worth tuning in. (Apr.)