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FIGURE 13.8. The postmaster general as pirate king. Ford, Wireless "License"Ramp, 117. Courtesy of the British Libraru.

The third possible solution lay in education. Since oscillation came from poorly tuned equipment, it ought to be possible to educate users out of the practice. The BBC produced countless pamphlets on avoiding oscillation, which it circulated widely with the aim of reaching every household. Its mass-circulation Radio Times and BBC Yearbook also included regular sections explaining the phenomenon and how to eliminate it (fig. 13.9). Cartoons drove home the message, contrasting the model citizenship of proper reception with the prospect of alienation that faced listeners-in who oscillated (figs. 13.1o and 13.11). The company even tried to get its point across by likening broadcast licenses to dog licenses, the oscillating receiver being the rabid rottweiler of the airwaves. The parallel was widely ridiculed as absurd. Still, unlike policing, the strategy of reeducation actually seemed to work somewhat. ByMarch 1925 complaints of oscillation were decreasing for the first time. But they showed no sign of disappearing altogether, and in many locations oscillation remained a plague.

The fourth possible strategywas the most significant. It was to develop a technological device to track down perpetrators of oscillation. It ought to be easy to use a direction-finding antenna to do this by triangulation (fig. 13.12). The idea of an oscillation detector was accordingly one that surfaced early. In March 1923, one aggrieved listener had already advertised in the national press for an "expert with direction-finder to detect experimenter, probably near Hyde Park."68This frustrated citizenwanted to track down an oscillator destroying his own listening. The Radio Association told the Sykes committee that its members could, in principle, use a direction-finding receiver to locate interferers.

But the real beauty of a detection device became evident a little later. Once experimenters and pirates were disaggregated, by a simple but powerful logic it could be used to solve the deeper problem afflicting the broadcasting system-that of listener piracy. Such piracy had been impossible to police because there was no way to tell who did not have a broadcast license. But pirate listeners and experimenters, all things being equal, were reckoned to be the two prime producers of oscillation.69 And the whole point about oscillation was that it was hard not to detect it. The debate about experimenters' licenses now made this into the key to enforcing the license system, by removing legitimate experimenters from the equation. The prime culprits of oscillation were now supposed to be listener pirates. An oscillation detector would therefore ex hypothesi detect those pirates. It promised to furnish the BBC with its savior: a scientific pirate detector (fig. 13.13)?°

FIGURE 13.9. "Twelve don'ts for listeners." BBC Handbook (1928), 262.

FIGURE 13.10. "The good listener does not oscillate." BBC Handbook (1928), 227.

At one stage engineers envisaged a fixed national system of detectors. But that would be prohibitively costly, and perhaps politically impossible. So they devised a scheme to use vehicles carrying direction-finding apparatus instead. In "very favourable circumstances," they hoped, such a van might be able to zero in on an oscillator's house. Two trial vehicles were ordered from a French company in early 1926, but it was not untilJuly that the first was ready to begin testing. It was a dark, cramped vehicle, like a smaller version of the "Black Marias" used by the police to ferry prisoners around. On its roofwas a large circular frame aerial. This could be rotated by means of a shaft descending into the rear of the van, where sat an operator and a "pilot." The procedure was to stop the van somewhere within range of the interference, tune the antenna to receive the distinctive howl, and rotate the aerial until the signal reached a minimum. The operator could then