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By Root 2181 0

examinations or professional diplomas, and in any case the Post Office resisted imposing any such "standard of importance" to distinguish between experimental programs.42 In the parliamentary inquiry that eventually looked at the issue, the idea of basing experimental identity on formal scientific qualifications was considered and rejected. It recognized experimental potential as too protean to be captured in formal examinations. An attempt byMcKinstry to limit licenses to members of technical institutes similarly expired, when it was pointed out that Edison himself would not have qualified by that criterion. "You are in danger of nipping in the bud all sorts of semi-genuine people," one witness warned: they "cannot prove their ability for anything of this kind and yet might be useful investigators or inventors."

A. A. Campbell Swinton, FRS, drove home the same point to grander effect. Swinton, who spoke for the Radio Society of Great Britain, roundly declared that radio "owes its existence to amateurs," and cited Marconi and Oliver Lodge -as well as Sir WilliamArmstrong, the Victorian enemy of intellectual property-as proving the point. No rule could exist for identifying experimenters like these. In practice, Swinton thought, "you have almost to let anybody experiment who wants to." The more people were encouraged to experiment, the more likely it was that the crucial discoverer would turn up. This was to Swinton a matter of national survival. "In our modern electrical civilization," he warned, "our commercial survival depends upon the attention given to electrical subjects." The big new U.S. industrial research laboratories could swamp any British rivals in their field. The only way to compete with them was to do something different-and the way to do that was to take advantage of the putatively British virtue of individuality. The stereotype of the British eccentric suggested a real strategy to set against the spirit of teamwork manifested inAmerican industrial research. The empire might depend on this virtue. Swinton-and his was a widespread view-was therefore arguing that Britain must protect the lone experimenter lest the nation become beholden to another power's intellectual property. Broadcasting policy must be subordinate to that paramount need. "From the point of view of the future of the country," he insisted, "the experimenter is a more important person than the broadcaster." Far from worrying about experimenters interfering with broadcasting, he warned of the dangers should broadcasting be allowed to interfere with experimenters. Swinton wanted the BBC silenced for regular intervals every day to let them work.43

Just as the BBC thought things could get no worse, the stakes were suddenly raised once again. Yet another new postmaster general arrived on the scene. William Joynson-Hicks ("Jix") was a populist Conservative of robustly reactionary moral views, but a free-trading gadfly when it came to technology. He was pronouncedly out of sympathy with a monopoly system. Jix announced forthwith that the government could not legally continue to deny licenses to bona fide experimenters. The moratorium therefore had to be lifted. Some selection process had to be put in place, therefore, and fast. A group of Post Office engineers was hastily convened to root through the backlog of applications and determine once and for all which claimants were "honestly experimental."

The result was an attempt at a quantified social taxonomy. The engineers produced a table classifying the applications into sixteen ranks, according to what they called their "character" (fig. 13.4). This table was an attempt to resolve the question of the population of experimenters, on the basis of four distinctions: whether one's home-built set came from a kit; formal qualifications or experience; an announced program of experiments (or at least a theme for one); and self-identification as a listener to broadcasting (true experimenters presumably did not listen in). It is difficult to be sure, but my sense is that this was the first attempt by state