Radio was the original overhyped technology | Hacker News Reader

Radio was the original overhyped technology

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31 pointsmaguay37 comments

I'm a bit confused by this piece.

A lot of it echoes the book "The Victorian Internet" that digs up historical nuggets from the early days of the telegraph that sound like the birth of the internet. (e.g. people running away and marrying people they fell in love with even though they'd only ever had text/Morse communication with them)

But it seems that they're interpreting "radio" in the modern sense, and so not counting TV, mobile phones, Bluetooth, WiFi, wireless charging etc. which the originators may not have guessed at, but wouldn't have abitrarily placed a boundary on their hopes based on categories not yet invented. Radio, in that bigger sense is a very vital thing, even if it's "normal" to most of us.

Author of this blog post here, thank you for mentioning The Victorian Internet. I’d read that years back, deeply enjoyed it, but didn’t think to reference it in this piece.

I’d read Empire of the Air and Hello, everybody! along with a number of older radio-focused journals (thanks, Internet Archive) for this piece, while researching the history of radio generally and broadcasting more broadly. And it struck me how many things were similar to more recent hype cycles in technologies, with lofty ideas, eccentric inventors, early military usage of tech that later would be seen as something to level the playing field, a focus on “speed and feeds” that then faded away as everything became good enough, and so on.

You’ve got a great point now at how much radio permeates daily life—the words in the article themselves were sent over bluetooth and wifi. I was focusing on radio broadcasting and the equipment and inventions that enabled that. But in a broader sense, it could almost be that this time period was the peak of expectations in the hype cycle, and then now we’re in the plateau of productivity. That may have been the better point to make.

You may also be familiar with the 1879 novel "Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes" - perhaps filling a similar fictional niche in its time that "You've Got Mail" did nearly 120 years later.

I think I disagree about the nature of the "hype cycle." Too often it's portrayed as a negative thing, or some kind of grift pulled on the hapless public. More optimistically it's like a period of brainstorming. Not all the ideas work out, not all the promises are delivered on (world peace is a big ask), but eventually the good ideas survive and come to fruition.

It's easy to be cynical about new technology in a world of nonstop bullshit marketing and incremental improvements sold as the Next Big Thing. But in the long run I don't feel like I've ever been truly let down by a "hyped" technology. Even Segway, the textbook example of reality distortion, eventually produced descendant technologies that found their way into a number of widely-used PEVs.

This was my thought as well. Radar, microwave communication, satellites... all use radio technology. It's so pervasive it's almost invisible.

I'm 65. When I was a kid I built a crystal radio, which inspired my grandfather to tell me about the early days of radio. He said he and his friends used to compete with each other to build radios that could receive stations from the farthest away. It was a real hacker culture!

This is called DX-ing, it's very well alive, however I'm not sure how much of the equipment users still build themselves, if any.

A lot of experimentation these days is SDRs. But people still build. The founders of Elecraft met at a club focused on building radios and decided to monetize their hobby.

I've just started getting into this using SDR.

Although I cannot design and build such low cost high performance digital receivers, I do have a lot of control over:

- software: I can make my own DSP pipelines for demodulation and filtering

- antenna: building antennas is completely approachable, using bits of wire, terminal blocks and basic tools

- RF input chain: analogue filters and amplifiers to cleanse the signal coming in

I also built a crystal radio as a kid. For something so low-tech and "simple", it was an amazing eye-opener into the nature of radio waves. As a form of energy and how information require energy.

You can still do this today, and it still works as well as it did back in the day. For an even more impressive trick use a razorblade as your rectifier, a toilet roll for the tuning capacitor, another toilet roll for the coil. Haven't found a low-tech way to make a piezo earphone just yet, but this gets the list of ingredients down to a jam-jar, a couple of toilet rolls, some insulated wire, an old razorblade, a bit of aluminum foil, some cardboard, that piezo earphone and a 100K or so resistor. Pure magic that such a list of parts can function as a radio, and without any power source other than the transmitter itself.

Is AM radio still on the air? or has digital kicked it to death?

Definitely still a thing in the US

It is dying off in Toronto, Canada. Advertisers migrating to FM as well as digital and internet.

In a way that's great. Can we get something like that for the web please, make a next generation internet so the advertisers will fuck off from this one? We'll tell them it's the hot new thing where everybody went to.

> Haven't found a low-tech way to make a piezo earphone just yet

The closer way I've found is this guy making it with a recycled transformer, a hard drive magnet, a jar lid, some wood, and some cables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEMXlLqwwTA (First part. 7:07 min.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXpprO5h79I (Second part. 9:32 min.)

Those videos are in Spanish but subtitles are available.

It’ll work for as long as there’s AM radio stations at least, they’re a bit of a dying breed in Europe although there’s still a few remaining networks of powerful national transmitters. The BBC just finished shutting down mediumwave local radio citing high costs per listener, though there’s a few hobbyist pirates popping up here and there along with noncommercial broadcasters like former offshore pirates Radio Caroline (if you haven’t read about those guys seriously give it a look, it’s a ridiculously cool story and very much in the hacker spirit if you’re into electronics). The longwave transmitter for Radio 4 will probably hang on a while yet I imagine though, hell hath no fury like English cricket fans deprived of Test Match Special.

A lovely concrete expression of this phenomenon: a popular toy wagon from the 1920s (still sold today) is called the ”radio flyer”. It is a red wagon with big rubber wheels and was so popular that a red wagon in its shape became the canonical or generic image for such a toy.

“Radio” was so modern and so exciting (as was the idea of flight) that its name was used talismanically as were “cyber” or “iXXX” a couple of decades ago. I mean, I can understand why zooming down a hill might make a kid think of flying, but radio? Simply modern and cool.

Same reason for the name “Motorola” — radios in cars is super cool.

That’s an incredible example; thank you for sharing!

Radio wasn't overhyped, it was overlegislated. We aren't allowed to use a lot of the spectrum, and what little we as citizens are allowed we are unable to secure. Radio was legislated into uselessness. We could have had a lot more a lot faster if we were able to make use of it.

Long ago, i read some of the early anti-FCC arguments; some of those people were prophets, and got to see much of the worst of their prophecies come true.

On the other hand: regulation is what made reliable and uninterrupted radio communication possible. Radio is not the internet: if I transmit with 100kW on 1234kHz I make that frequency unusable for anyone else in a wide neighbourhood. Bandwidth is a lot scarcer than IPv6 or even IPv4 addresses. The Radio Act of 1912 - the very first "radio law" - was a response to the confusion on the airwaves that contributed to the Titanic disaster (see https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Navigation/Community/Arcad...)

That would be a funny experiment: unregulated the spectrum. I would guess that industry will try to self-regulate, but for private use beating up would be a primary method of stopping people from jamming all the frequencies in the neighborhood.

We already have that in the 2.4 ghz band.

"Radio? Like 5G but less bandwidth, like TV but just sound." It lives on in (almost) all the wireless communication technologies of today, and broadcast radio channels as a cultural and business phenomenon have just added a video stream, the signal may be digital and relayed by satellites or over the internet. If there was hype about either of the two, it was unrealism about how long it would take for some of the applications to become mainstream.

Author here, great point—I was seeing early radio as the peak of expectations in the Hype Cycle, and today’s ever-present use of radio in bluetooth, wifi, cellular connectivity, and so on is fulfilling the original radio hopes and dreams while leaving radio broadcasting itself behind.

Radio was initially fairly cumbersome, so in WW1 it was restricted but was not a long range threat - still all of Europe feared the spy sending data to another spy in another country After WW1 Europe stayed locked down with draconian laws limiting private radios. At this time they relied on fenced borders - radio made them crap their pants. They had a Spy-Vs-Spy mind set, still it was manageable, long range stuff was large in terms of antennas etc. The USA relied in the Atlantic ocean - small transmitters did not have the range and large ones were easy to find and hard to hide. The net USA result was radio amateurs, crystal sets etc were not limited apart from the licence. So radio grew enormously in the USA, thousands of independent radio stations and millions of radio receivers. In Europe radio transmitters were government owned, BBC etc, so it grew a little but nothing like the USA. Rest of Europe more or less similar. By 1939 = WW2 all in europe were in the middle ages, more or less, in terms of radio at all levels. At universities etc, research took place, but wide dissemination and adoption was interdicted by this oppressive milieu. Thus the USA gained on the UK/Europe after WW1 and by the time WW2 happened it was far ahead. During WW2 radio was locked down again, but the USA has by far the largest pool of amateur radio people - who all knew Morse Code.

13 days later, the illusion shattered, as a German U-boat’s torpedo sank the Lusitania and brought America into the war.

Not quite correct. There was such a thing as 'The Zimmerman Telegram'.

There were two years (half the length of WW1) between the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the US declaration of war in 1917.

I might have read this article. The only thing stopping me was:

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It was not overhyped. Radio was incredibly important.

All those worries mentioned in the article were correct and actualized. The switch into radio was bigger change than moving to TV later.

Every coup, takeover or occupation started with gaining control of radio stations. Stalin was obsessed with radio.

Radio was central medium of informing, coordinating, controlling and influencing people. Orson Welles's War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast caused widespread panic.

> Orson Welles's War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast caused widespread panic.

No it didn’t: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/war-of-the-worlds/

As a kid I learned piano from someone who experienced personal panic during the original broadcast. Only now did I make the connection in my mind between her stories and War of the Worlds. Snopes "debunking" something doesn't mean it didn't happen at all.

Your second-hand anecdote proves nothing to anyone except to you. And even you should be wary of trusting random people with personal stories to tell of how they were involved in some well-known historical event. Especially when there was major news coverage starting the very next day which exaggerated the event way out of proportion. People’s memories are affected by what they read.

It’s at least very disputed if any significant amount of people were actually affected: https://www.snopes.com/collections/debunker-10-30-2019/

Why do people have a fascination with proving others' real life experiences "wrong" using some aggregated idea from a self-appointed authority figure? Statistics and summaries don't remotely represent or contradict individual experiences. Try telling someone who was struck by lightning that, no, they really weren't, because lightning strikes are rare.

The original claim was “widespread panic”. I provided a link which argued against it. You said “Snopes "debunking" something doesn't mean it didn't happen at all.”, which I took to mean that you argued that widespread panic did happen. Do you mean to say that the only thing which you are claiming is that at least one person panicked? Because that is something we can agree on. But that’s not what the topic was about.

"Radio was the original overhyped technology"

What?

> Fake news became the new worry. .... wrote National Broadcasting Co.’s Dr. James Angell in 1939.

Nazi's used radio successfully, they created cheap radios to do it - https://daily.jstor.org/an-affordable-radio-brought-nazi-pro...

Rwanda and the extermination of 'cockroaches' on RTLM in 1994

Radio literally raised our IQs, I don't mean educated us, it changed the structure of our brains. (It also educated us)

For the rich it moved to TV, but for the poor it's only the internet that might replace radios power.

As a side note, the radio guided ship was about torpedoes, which actually never happened, it was developed in WW2 but not used, it went to wires which is interesting. But radio controlled bombs where used in WW2 which is pretty close to a torpedo.

Why reading this post felt so weird? Like it was written by some AI.

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