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FIGURE 13.6. The wireless pirate as everyman. Daily Express, February, 18, 1925•

The second case was more serious. It arose in 1924, at a time when the Evening News was warning that "the day is not far distant when wireless pirates will be prosecuted." It centered on a Londoner named Robert Ford. In lieu of a license for his son's receiver, Ford sent the BBC one guinea for its service, claiming that he listened largely to overseas stations. Then he challenged the postmaster general to prosecute. When nothing happened, he concluded that licenses were evidently not required. But at length a warrant was issued, his home was searched, and he was arrested (fig. 13.7). He insisted on being jailed, which allowed him to proclaim himself "the first individual in history... to be imprisoned as a result of the use of one of his five senses in his own home."60 After he got out he published a rambling attack on the entire broadcasting system.61 Ford claimed that the license was an unconstitutional tax, imposed without parliamentary authorization. Even the Post Office's authority to license reception was in his view groundless -he pointed out that the 1904Teleg- raphyAct, on which that authority rested, referred only to transmission and not to reception. (He was correct, and the assertion was much ballyhooed by the Express; the government responded by quietly passing a law that redefined the term "transmission" to include the whole process.)62 Finally, nobody could prevent ethereal waves from crossing the threshold, and a listener merely attended to them; why should the act of listening render the home subject to forcible entry? It threatened what he called "the 'castle' principle." Ford could even quote unfortunate statements by Reith and the postmaster general that a right to enter homes was essential to maintaining the Post Office's "control of the ether." This was exactly the prospect most trumpeted by the conservative press, which was given to declaring that it would be better to "abolish wireless" than forfeit liberty. For Ford the whole license system rested on a "piratical presumption" to "proprietorship of the universal ether," not to mention to "authorship of `wireless' itself." He ended up indicting the postmaster general as a "self-confessed pirate"-the one "Real Wireless Pirate," no less. His book culminated in a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style mock opera in which this buccaneer stood aboard his vessel Transmizzione gloating that "it is a glorious thing to be a Pirate King," as he fleeced the headphoned passengers of the EZPublico (fig. 13.8).63

If overt policing was an unappetizing option, there remained the possibility of delegating oversight to local communities of amateurs. This was the approach preferred in the United States. But groups like the Radio Association were apprehensive. The overtones of vigilantism were all too evident.64 InAmerica, they knew, the custom had not been entirely above controversy. Herbert Hoover once asked the leader of one amateur association-possibly Hugo Gernsback, the pioneer of pulp science fiction magazines -what his members did when they found an interferer, and he ingenuously replied that "we just take the fellow out and beat him up."65 Nothing so vulgar happened in Britain, as far as is known, but nevertheless the prospect of lay surveillance made many uneasy. Ford called it a "system ofuniversal espionage," and it was widely suspected that the BBC orchestrated such a system.66 But in fact the BBC and Post Office were unenthusiastic-because they had tried this kind of thing and found it wanting. Their engineers had found lay informers' testimony to be unreliable, despite efforts to standardize it by the use of questionnaires, and their "spy system" had produced very mixed results. Ten percent of complainants had turned out to be producing their own oscillation. In the end the "self styled voluntary inspectors" were suppressed, not as sinister, but as useless.67

FIGURE 13.7. Arresting apirate. R.M.Ford, The Wireless"License"Ramp: ALessoninBureaucracy" (London: St.