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By Root 2066 0

those parts in new ways, and to roam across the ether.48 Constructors needed none of those freedoms. Yet they too needed parts to build their sets. A real stumbling block in the way of a constructor's license derived from this: it seemed to open the door to bunglers with substandard parts, threatening horrendous oscillation that would drown out broadcasting. Both the Post Office and the BBC balked at mere constructors being let loose for this reason. They mooted providing lists of approved, standardized parts, to which constructors would be restricted.49 But what was a "part"? Many were things like solenoids, batteries, and accumulators that had multiple nonradio uses. Noble finally conceded defeat when pressed for a definition. Even McKinstry could offer nothing better than a revealing tautology: a component part, he proposed, was a part entered on a list of components drawn up by an expert.5° It was harder still to see how to standardize such parts -let alone how to charge a royalty on their sale, as the BBC wanted. Furthermore, to construct a set should mean to make it from "raw materials," the broadcaster insisted; merely "assembling" it was "a totally different thing." Yet components were bought ready-made, and were hardly "raw." Even if a list of standard parts could be created, therefore, nothing would prevent entrepreneurs from producing lower-level parts for making those parts. This was exactly the kind of conundrum that had led engineers in the first place to throw up their hands and argue that they should "box everything."Si Boxing the radio-or even its "parts"was therefore indelibly linked to defining the experimenter. Neither was practically or politically feasible.

As a result, the answer to the question of the experimenter turned out to be at once the simplest and the most complex of all. There was no way to tell who was or was not an experimenter, nor to count how many there were. Or, to put it another way, everyone was an experimenter, at least potentially. In that case, radio took on a different role. It might be the trigger that could turn potential into actuality, taking dormant talents and enticing them into use. "The listener may perhaps become an experimenter," as the Sykes committee reported, and "the experimenter may possibly become an inventor." It was not that there was no distinction to be made, but that there was no consistent rule sure enough to stand as a reliable basis for making that distinction in advance. It was beyond the capabilities of bureaucratic assessment systems. Something essential in the nature of science had apparently been resolved.

There was nothing else for it. If experimenters were not a discrete class, then the experimenter's license had to go. Until the end of 1924, the Sykes committee concluded, two kinds of license should be issued: the broadcast license at i o s, and a constructor's license at I5s. The latter would disappear at the start of 1925, when the royalty on equipment would also be abolished. Everyone would then buy the same license, and protectionism would cease. In that case, piracy would surely plummet. The recommendation was adopted, and the panel was proved right. The problem of evasion shrank so quickly that the constructor's license was relinquished six months early.52 Just as important was the fact that doing awaywith the experimenter's license had relieved the Post Office of "the difficult and somewhat invidious duty of determining whether applicants are genuine experimenters or not."

The British Broadcasting Company did not long outlive the crisis. A second parliamentary committee, chaired by the Earl of Crawford in 1925-26, marked its end. It was wound up and replaced by a new entity, the British Broadcasting Corporation- the organization that has survived and grown into today's BBC. This was more explicitly a public body, with the basis of the old group in patent pooling and protection retreating into obscurity. Henceforth, British broadcasting would be funded by a uniform license imposed on all users of receivers, on the assumption that all benefited