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By Root 2010 0

from the service. From now on, the distinction between listeners and pirates would be stark, with no experimenters left in the middle to blur things. Meanwhile, the new-form BBC was soon seen as not just a new kind of media organization, but a model for the management of any major resource for the common good. This "public interest corporation," a novel hybrid of state ownership and independent management, offered the promise of a future social order built on wisely paternalist consensus, rather than imposed by totalitarian statecraft or exploitative capitalism. Before long John Maynard Keynes was pointing to the BBC to argue that his age was witnessing "the end of laissez faire. "53

THE WAR ON OSCILLATORS

Every piece of evidence submitted to the Sykes and Crawford committees shared the assumption that interference was a defining problem of wireless, and therefore that nature itself made monopoly an unavoidable choice for broadcasting. Every piece except one, that is. The exception was the dossier of an obscure company calling itself Secret Wireless. Secret Wireless had a technology that it claimed could eliminate the need for monopoly and destroy listener piracy at a stroke. The brainchild of a bicycle mechanic and amateur inventor-one of the thousands of experimenter-pirates the BBC suspected to live in the engineering city of Coventry-the company's device split a signal between three separate wavelengths (fig. 13.5), which at the receiving end a special set would recombine into one. The original aim had been for confidentiality- an old dream of wireless engineers, back when radio had been in competition with telegraphy-but now the gadget took on a new purpose. It could lock up a signal and deny access to anyone without a license. By this one simple machine, it claimed, the "`pirates' would be wiped out." Moreover, several broadcasters could operate without mutual interference. Even a wireless telephone system might be possible. Ether chaos would be forgotten. Out of the entire mass of evidence considered by the government in the 192os, this was the only testimony that seriously questioned the fundamental assertion that the physics of the ether dictated a monopoly. It is striking that the radical proposal came from the world of the experimenters- the veryworld disdained by the Post Office and BBC as piratical.

There was only one problem: Secret Wireless's invention did not work. Post Office engineers were steadfastly skeptical of the company's claims, on cultural as well as technical grounds. A broadly tuned receiver (as many were) would simply catch all three wavelengths, and in any case the community of amateurs, given its character, would surely publish circuit diagrams for a decoder within weeks of any launch. There could be no justification for using three valuable wavelengths for the system. The company failed to get approval for a testing station, and without that facility could do nothing. In the absence of a working alternative, authorities therefore remained convinced that the onlyway to preserve the public good was to purge the ether of laissez-faire. Wavebands must be parceled out as "a valuable form of public property" Systems descended from that perception would dominate broadcasting for the rest of the century, even though critics protested many times that the axiom was fragile. Only with digitization would the kind of possibility suggested by Secret Wireless seem plausible once again.54

So the BBC remained a monopoly funded by licenses, and pirate listeners continued to threaten it. But an insight gained from the controversy about experimenters now returned to suggest a way of defeating them. Both pirate listeners and experimenters were liable to open their sets and meddle with them. In particular, they tried to boost reception by adopting an electronic resonance technique known as reaction. This would tend to cause the aerial to oscillate, however, drowning out the broadcast signal for everyone in the neighborhood by a piercing ethereal howl. The standardizing of sets and parts had been partly intended