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By Root 2036 0

of listener piracy to cut a swathe through the suppositions on which the broadcasting regime was based. By the time the crisis came to a head in spring 1923, the number of experimenters in Britain had apparently increased by some io,ooo percent, with unknown hundreds of thousands of outright pirates too. The number of broadcast licenses sold was meanwhile only eighty thousand-a long way short of the two hundred thousand initially envisaged. Sales of new BBC receivers had meanwhile slumped by 75 percent, which far exceeded anything attributable to market saturation. Everyone assumed that the missing purchasers were buying unlicensed sets. It was a calamity, and it was clearly due to pirates. But nobody had anyway to identify the out-and-out license evaders. So attention focused instead on the people who had licenses but claimed to be experimenters. These could be found, certainly, but the question they posed was one of authenticity. The fate of broadcasting now hung on the deceptively simple problem of telling a true experimenter from a piratical imposter.

That problem was a very delicate one. The experimenter's license encapsulated what were seen-not least by the Post Office-as freedoms both useful and powerfully symbolic. Those who proclaimed the right of science to access the ether did not lack for powerful friends. After all, until broadcasting came along, all licenses had been for experimenting, and officials valued their role in supporting what they now distinguished as "bona fide experimenters." Originally the question of bona fides had not arisen at all. "Experimenters" had simply been amateur enthusiasts who built their own sets. They had been motivated not by the desire to listen to broadcasting, which had not existed, but by curiosity about the properties of wireless, the ether, and the future of communication. The development ofwireless had taken place largely at their hands. Moreover, the figure of the experimenter as a modest, plainspoken, virtuous worker ofwonders commanded widespread respect-before Big Science, it seemed that not much separated the radio researcher from a figure like Ernest Rutherford, who had risen from colonial origins to the pinnacle of scientific achievement. Not least, that figure was seen as a peculiarly British individual, personifying hope for the empire's future in the face of German discipline andAmerican teamwork. Indeed, Kellaway had found himself facing parliamentary challenges on this score even before the BBC plan was finalized. Rumors about sealed sets, restrictions on equipment, and a monopoly on transmission had all aroused fears for the future of science, and therefore for that of Britain. "Why are not the British public permitted to obtain the best instruments science and brains can produce?" one MP had demanded to know. Another alleged that "if they shut out foreign inventions from coming into this country, the development of science may suffer." 19 It would be "perfectly absurd," agreed the laissez-faire advocate and publisher Sir Ernest Benn: "what people want is the freest intercourse of the scientific ideas of all the nations of the world."20 MPs liked nothing better than to hail the "large and enthusiastic and important body of scientific men, chiefly young men, in this country, who are deeply interested in amateurwireless telegraphy." Experimenters' licenses should be not only available, some thought, but free, lest the authorities hobble "this new and very interesting scientific development." In the end Kellaway had had to commit himself publicly to the experimenter's license in order to get the BBC launched at all. The freedom of science was apparently at stake.21

There is even evidence that the prospect of an outcry over experimenters may be what frightened the radio companies into setting aside their patent feuds so suddenly and coalescing around the BBC plan. The big six companies had realized from the outset that they must make special concessions for what they too called "bona fide" experimenters. 22 But as negotiations proceeded Sir William Noble secretly