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.