Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home

Longtime BBC producer Rubens recounts the national, social, and mechanical changes, as told from individual listeners’ perspectives, that Marconi’s wireless brought to Britain between 1922 (the inception of the British Broadcasting Corporation) and 1939. This followed the trajectory of earlier auditory technology—from parlor pianos to telephones to gramophones. Rubens suggests that radio fostered an immediacy with major interwar events—the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, the 1926 General Strike, women’s suffrage, King Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936, his brother’s subsequent coronation, and the march toward World War II. Radio featured class- and age-based programming, strengthened the domestic sphere by arranging families around a communal listening area, and sparked the homogenization of England’s regional accents, all while spurring their competitors, newspapers, to democratize their presentations. The moralistic John Reith, head of the reliable but not impartial BBC, encouraged erudition and prescribed entertainment, creating the space for the commercial Radio Luxembourg to offer more popular fare. Rubens’s account of this fascinating history is replete with illustrations, including insightful cartoons, and draws on materials from Oxford’s Bodleian Library and History of Science Museum.