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By Root 1977 0

to its ranks, so they were not authorized to sell parts at all. Second, they pirated-in the old sense of unauthorized reprinting-the "British Broadcasting Company" decal and slapped it onto substandard parts that they then sold for genuine. And, third, they violated Marconi's patents. (Complaints on this last score lessened somewhat, it must be said, when it turned out that Marconi itself was quietly importing headphones from Central Europe under a shell company called British Danubian Imports.) The general problem they presented, however, was that they provided an escape clause to the license system. Any literate person could now construct a receiver by following their instructions. Such instructions circulated very widely, appearing on cigarette cards, for example, and told how to make radios out of everyday items like whisky bottles (fig. 13.3).30 Inherent in the liberal criterion for experimenters' licenses had been the assumption that building a set was hard. That was why it was a good proxy for expertise. But now everyman could cobble together a radio. The clients of the pirate firms thus committed both listener piracy and patent piracy at once, and could getaway with it by claiming to be experimenters on a definition that no longer worked. If not stopped, complained Western Electric, this practice would "spoil the whole thing."31

FIGURE 13.3. Bottled wireless. Daily Express, April 25,1923-

Invoking the rise of this market in parts, furthermore, the press now insisted-and the company conceded the point- that a large proportion of so-called pirates were in reality victims of their own consciences. That is, they were not buying licenses because no license applied to them. They built their own sets, and therefore met the old "liberal" definition of experimenters; but they used their sets only for listening in to the BBC, and so did not see themselves as experimenters at all. The Express estimated that fully 75 percent of all set owners fitted this bill. These pirates were actually the most enterprising and principled class of Britons, added the Mail. They were "so keen that they have made their own sets," but at the same time were ethical enough to resist a false characterization and defy an overweening state. "If it comes to the two choices they would rather choose being a pirate than having their name given and being subject to arrest. "32 The system was thus creating tens of thousands of criminals of conscience. The press began to call on the Post Office to create a third kind of permit, therefore, which it dubbed a "constructor's license."As the Daily News put it, if "an ingenious amateur" could make a receiver using parts, then this "amateur with experimental leanings" must be accommodated in away that did not offend against the very virtues of honesty and plainspokenness that experimenters ought to possess.

Creating such a license would mean acknowledging that the liberal definition of the experimenter was dead. It would require a new, more substantive definition, involving the pursuit of experiments after building a set.33 The company saw an opportunity here. If a much smaller set of experimenters could be identified and set aside, then it could pursue its true targets with much less political trouble. Maybe experimenters' licenses could be restricted to what Chamberlain called, in a meeting with Reith and Noble, "scientific research wireless workers."34 In March 1923, hoping for such an outcome, the company submitted its own proposal for a £1 constructor's license that would still restrict its holders to parts of British manufacture. But the Post Office remained opposed, still fearing condemnation for imposing a tax on the curiosity of the "boy, or young person, or poor man. "35And the parts manufacturers respondedwith outright hostility. They launched their own full-blooded campaign against the BBC, denouncing it as a combine squatting on an industry that had outgrown any need for monopoly. The result, they declared, was "the chaos at present existing in the trade," in which "piracy is encouraged." Apparently