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By Root 1967 0

fraction of the fifty thousand applicants. It guessed perhaps five thousand at most, insisting that the Post Office was witnessing "a wholesale effort made by boys of all kinds to call themselves inventors." 27 Yet it refused to say why it believed this. A "machinery" for "finding out who are genuine experimenters and who are not" was beyond its remit, it declared. Only the state had the legitimacy to establish such a mechanism. And as it happened, the Post Office did have a criterion for identifying experimenters. The problem was that the advent of broadcasting had rendered it completely useless.

The Post Office's standard had been adopted as part of the deal introducing the broadcast license in the first place. It was called the "liberal" criterion. It held that anyone who built a receiver was both qualified and, presumptively, motivated to do experiments. This was the definition that the postmaster general had upheld in winning Parliament's approval for the broadcasting plan, and until now the Post Office had tried to maintain it in practice. But finer-grained definitions were considered and sometimes implemented piecemeal on the basis of the Post Office engineers' experience of appraising how "fit" applicants had been for transmission licenses prior to 1922. Applicants had to show themselves "men of good character," for example-one Harold Butler being "an Honest, Hard-working and Industrious Man, ... very Intelligent among Machinery." One possible qualification was a declared commitment to some specific program of experimental work, such as a study of the effects of weather on reception. Another, seen as much more plausible, was the ability to use a receiving set without oscillating. But none seemed workable as a general rule. The press would surely raise hell about more constraints on science, and constituents were already complaining to their MPs of being denied experimenters' licenses. Why was a Mr. Dwyer of Pengam denied a license, for example? Because, his MP learned, experimenters' licenses were issued "to all applicants who furnish evidence that they have a definite object of experiment inview and possess sufficient qualifications for the purpose." Dwyer had been deemed to have no scientific qualifications. A similar query revealed that military officers were generally assumed competent to be experimenters. These were touchy subjects, however, and the postmaster general made haste to affirm that he could see no better way than the liberal rule to distinguish "bona fide experimenters, whose license fee he would not desire to increase." Perhaps a "boy" who assembled a set from parts was not really a "bona fide experimenter," he conceded, but rendering any finer distinction as a matter of consistent policy was impossible.28 He even denied that listening to the BBC disqualified one from claiming the title of experimenter. After all, an experiment in reception might depend on receiving the broadcast signal, in which case the distinction would lie in how the recipient experienced it. As one scientist put it helpfully, "the experimenter may listen to the `Beggar's Opera' purely for the purposes of comparison, but he must not listen to it for purposes of enjoyment."29

It soon became clear that the basic assumption behind the "liberal" definition of the experimenter had ceased to make sense anyway. The assumption had been that someone skilled enough to make a set would be capable of experimenting with it. But what it meant to "make" a set had changed. Companies had sprung up to supply parts that users could simply bolt together. Some manufactured their own, others imported them, this being all too tempting for "the pirate in the trade who stops outside the B.B.C. and `takes his risk."' These enterprising parts makers were generally not specialist radio firms, but, as McKinstry put it derisively, mechanics capable of making "a small nut, a small screw, or a bit ofwire." He called them "pirate firms," and meant the charge in at least three senses. First, as they were not radio manufacturers the BBC would not admit them